Kent's bookshelf: all en-US Tue, 06 May 2025 07:21:33 -0700 60 Kent's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The Lincoln Highway 57139780 The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America

In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the work farm where he has just served a year for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett’s intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother and head west where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden’s car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett’s future.

Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles’s third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.]]>
576 Amor Towles 0735222371 Kent 0 currently-reading 4.36 2021 The Lincoln Highway
author: Amor Towles
name: Kent
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/06
shelves: currently-reading
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Camino Island 41310871 This is an updated cover of this Kindle edition. *

A gang of thieves stage a daring heist from a vault deep below Princeton University’s Firestone Library. Their loot is priceless, impossible to resist.

Bruce Cable owns a popular bookstore in the sleepy resort town of Santa Rosa on Camino Island in Florida. He makes his real money, though, as a prominent dealer in rare books. Very few people know that he occasionally dabbles in unsavory ventures.

Mercer Mann is a young novelist with a severe case of writer’s block who has recently been laid off from her teaching position. She is approached by an elegant, mysterious woman working for an even more mysterious company. A generous monetary offer convinces Mercer to go undercover and infiltrate Cable’s circle of literary friends, to get close to the ringleader, to discover his secrets.

But soon Mercer learns far too much, and there’s trouble in paradise—as only John Grisham can deliver it.]]>
306 John Grisham 0385543050 Kent 0 currently-reading 4.21 2017 Camino Island
author: John Grisham
name: Kent
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/03
shelves: currently-reading
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Wish You Well 6523342 the hectic New York City of 1940 with her family.
Then tragedy strikes--and Lou and her younger brother,
Oz, must go with their invalid mother to live on their
great-grandmother's farm in the Virginia mountains.
Suddenly Lou finds herself coming of age in a new
landscape, making her first true friend, and experiencing
adventures tragic, comic, and audacious. But the forces
of greed and justice are about to clash over her new
home . . . and as their struggle is played out in a crowded
Virginia courtroom, it will determine the future of two
children, an entire town, and the mountains they love.]]>
384 David Baldacci Kent 4 4.41 2000 Wish You Well
author: David Baldacci
name: Kent
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2025/05/01
date added: 2025/05/01
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James 179550498
While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin�), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a “literary icon� (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.]]>
304 Percival Everett 0385550375 Kent 5 4.60 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Kent
average rating: 4.60
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/19
date added: 2025/04/19
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Blackbird House 6582538 With “incantatory prose� that “sweeps over the reader like a dream,� (Philadelphia Inquirer), Hoffman follows her celebrated bestseller The Probable Future, with an evocative work that traces the lives of the various occupants of an old Massachusetts house over a span of two hundred years.In a rare and gorgeous departure, beloved novelist Alice Hoffman weaves a web of tales, all set in Blackbird House. This small farm on the outer reaches of Cape Cod is a place that is as bewitching and alive as the characters we Violet, a brilliant girl who is in love with books and with a man destined to betray her; Lysander Wynn, attacked by a halibut as big as a horse, certain that his life is ruined until a boarder wearing red boots arrives to change everything; Maya Cooper, who does not understand the true meaning of the love between her mother and father until it is nearly too late. From the time of the British occupation of Massachusetts to our own modern world, family after family’s lives are inexorably changed, not only by the people they love but by the lives they lead inside Blackbird House. These interconnected narratives are as intelligent as they are haunting, as luminous as they are unusual. Inside Blackbird House more than a dozen men and women learn how love transforms us and how it is the one lasting element in our lives. The past both dissipates and remains contained inside the rooms of Blackbird House, where there are terrible secrets, inspired beauty, and, above all else, a spirit of coming home.From the writer Time has said tells "truths powerful enough to break a reader’s heart� comes a glorious travelogue through time and fate, through loss and love and survival. Welcome to Blackbird House.]]> 256 Alice Hoffman Kent 4 3.98 2004 Blackbird House
author: Alice Hoffman
name: Kent
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/11
date added: 2025/04/11
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Fairy Tale 60188762
Legendary storyteller Stephen King goes deep into the well of his imagination in this spellbinding novel about a seventeen-year-old boy who inherits the keys to a parallel world where good and evil are at war, and the stakes could not be higher—for their world or ours.

Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was ten, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself—and his dad. Then, when Charlie is seventeen, he meets Howard Bowditch, a recluse with a big dog in a big house at the top of a big hill. In the backyard is a locked shed from which strange sounds emerge, as if some creature is trying to escape. When Mr. Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie the house, a massive amount of gold, a cassette tape telling a story that is impossible to believe, and a responsibility far too massive for a boy to shoulder.

Because within the shed is a portal to another world—one whose denizens are in peril and whose monstrous leaders may destroy their own world, and ours. In this parallel universe, where two moons race across the sky, and the grand towers of a sprawling palace pierce the clouds, there are exiled princesses and princes who suffer horrific punishments; there are dungeons; there are games in which men and women must fight each other to the death for the amusement of the “Fair One.� And there is a magic sundial that can turn back time.

A story as old as myth, and as startling and iconic as the rest of King’s work, Fairy Tale is about an ordinary guy forced into the hero’s role by circumstance, and it is both spectacularly suspenseful and satisfying.]]>
607 Stephen King Kent 4 4.38 2022 Fairy Tale
author: Stephen King
name: Kent
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
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The Bee Sting 62165787
If you wanted to change this story, how far back would you have to go? To the infamous bee sting that ruined Imelda’s wedding day? To the car crash one year before Cass was born? All the way back to Dickie at ten years old, standing in the summer garden with his father, learning how to be a real man?

The Bee Sting, Paul Murray’s exuberantly entertaining new novel, is a tour de force: a portrait of postcrash Ireland, a tragicomic family saga, and a dazzling story about the struggle to be good at the end of the world.]]>
736 Paul Murray 0374600317 Kent 4 3.77 2023 The Bee Sting
author: Paul Murray
name: Kent
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/30
date added: 2025/03/30
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Station Eleven 59815561 An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

A National Book Award Finalist
A PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist

Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.

Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.]]>
353 Emily St. John Mandel Kent 4 4.22 2014 Station Eleven
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Kent
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/05
date added: 2025/03/05
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<![CDATA[The Ninja Daughter (Lily Wong, #1)]]> 51124554
After her sister is raped and murdered, Lily Wong dedicates her life and ninja skills to the protection of women. But her mission is complicated. Not only does she live above the Chinese restaurant owned by her Norwegian father and inspired by the recipes of her Chinese mother, but she has to hide her true self from her Hong Kong tiger mom is already disappointed at her less than feminine ways, and who would be horrified if she knew what she had become.

But when a woman and her son she escorted safely to an abused women’s shelter return home to dangerous consequences, Lily is forced to not only confront her family and her past, but team up with a mysterious―and very lethal―stranger to rescue them.]]>
320 Tori Eldridge 1947993690 Kent 0 great-story 3.62 2019 The Ninja Daughter (Lily Wong, #1)
author: Tori Eldridge
name: Kent
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves: great-story
review:

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<![CDATA[Fear the Flames (Fear the Flames, #1)]]> 204256266 NATIONAL BESTSELLER � An exiled princess teams up with the last man she thought she could trust in the start of a dazzling and unforgettable epic fantasy romance series.

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

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

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

An immersive fantasy filled with a sizzling reluctant-allies-to-lovers romance, a world to get lost in, dangerous quests, dragon bonds, and an entertaining band of characters to root for, Fear the Flames marks the stunning debut of Olivia Rose Darling.]]>
373 Olivia Rose Darling 0593873904 Kent 4 3.81 2022 Fear the Flames (Fear the Flames, #1)
author: Olivia Rose Darling
name: Kent
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/11
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves:
review:
Not my typical genre, romance, but it wasn't a bad read. I was taken aback by the details of sex in the book, a bit graphic at times. I like the fantasy genre that surrounded the romance, dragons, swords, knives and a bit of blood and guts.
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<![CDATA[A Time to Kill (Jake Brigance, #1)]]> 217339716
“John Grisham may well be the best American storyteller writing today.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

The life of a ten-year-old black girl is shattered by two drunken and remorseless white men. The mostly white town of Clanton in Ford County, Mississippi, reacts with shock and horror at the inhuman crime—until the girl’s father acquires an assault rifle and takes justice into his own hands.

For ten days, as burning crosses and the crack of sniper fire spread through the streets of Clanton, the nation sits spellbound as defense attorney Jake Brigance struggles to save his client’s life—and then his own.

Don’t miss John Grisham’s new book, THE EXCHANGE: AFTER THE FIRM!]]>
515 John Grisham Kent 4 4.51 1989 A Time to Kill (Jake Brigance, #1)
author: John Grisham
name: Kent
average rating: 4.51
book published: 1989
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/28
date added: 2025/01/28
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<![CDATA[Sycamore Row (Jake Brigance, #2)]]> 43244543 Именно здесь развернулось действие романа «Пора убивать», принесшего автору мировую славу, ставшего классикой жанра и основой потрясающего фильма с Мэттью Макконахи, Сэмюэлом Л. Джексоном и Сандрой Баллок в главных ролях. Именно в этом романе впервые появился молодой адвокат Джейк Брайгенс, бросивший вызов неумолимой судебной системе, чтобы защитить отчаявшегося отца, который застрелил двух подонков, надругавшихся над его маленькой дочерью.
И вот � новое дело Джейка Брайгенса. Дело о загадочном завещании очень богатого южанина Сета Хаббарда, который распорядился своим состоянием так, что это шокировало не только его близких, но и всех, кто его знал. Сын и дочь богача готовы горы свернуть, чтобы доказать: их отец был не в своем уме, когда составлял этот документ.
Но Джек Брайгенс намерен убедить присяжных в противоположном � у Сета Хаббарда имелись веские причины, поступить именно так, а не иначе. И чтобы сделать это, Брайгенсу придется раскрыть опасную тайну, многие годы скрывавшуюся за вычурными фасадами особняков уютного южного городка…]]>
658 John Grisham Kent 5 4.53 2013 Sycamore Row (Jake Brigance, #2)
author: John Grisham
name: Kent
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/28
date added: 2025/01/28
shelves:
review:

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<![CDATA[The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle]]> 40033006
There are eight days, and eight witnesses for you to inhabit.

We will only let you escape once you tell us the name of the killer.

Understood? Then let's begin . . .

Evelyn Hardcastle will die. Every day until Aiden Bishop can identify her killer and break the cycle. But every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes up in the body of a different guest. And some of his hosts are more helpful than others . . .

The most inventive debut of the year twists together a mystery of such unexpected creativity it will leave listeners guessing until the very last second.]]>
482 Stuart Turton Kent 3 3.78 2018 The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
author: Stuart Turton
name: Kent
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/16
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves:
review:
Confusing to me. The writing was good, but the story jumped in too many directions, and in too many time periods and the time periods were not in order. Because of this, I had a hard time keeping concentration. It's a nice book to help you fall asleep.
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Pachinko 60578011 490 Min Jin Lee 8740052397 Kent 5 4.45 2017 Pachinko
author: Min Jin Lee
name: Kent
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/06
date added: 2025/01/06
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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle 57012688 The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force—and one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels.

In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is an astonishingly imaginative detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets from Japan’s forgotten campaign in Manchuria during World War II.]]>
626 Haruki Murakami Kent 4 4.08 1994 The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Kent
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1994
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/27
date added: 2024/12/27
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<![CDATA[The Misery House (The House on the Hill, #1)]]> 65144024 A psychological thriller and a family you'll never forget.

New Haven: This rural town has never seen a string of tragedies like this. A local store burns to the ground with two bodies inside. A newlywed couple goes missing, and all signs point to the abandoned house. With no answers, the townsfolk grow more and more worried.

The Woods family has lived here forever. But when their friends and their own children are put in danger, the threat hits home. This close-knit family must risk everything to find answers, but time is running out.

New Haven has secrets. And a haunted house like you've never seen before.

The Misery House is a chilling, suspenseful novel that will keep you guessing until the very end and set the stage for an epic three-book haunting. With its twists and turns, a likable family thrust into danger, this page-turner will keep you up late into the night.

It’s up to the Woods family. Some fates are worse than death. Is it too late to save their town... and each other?]]>
224 David Duane Kummer Kent 4 4.07 2023 The Misery House (The House on the Hill, #1)
author: David Duane Kummer
name: Kent
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/04
date added: 2024/12/17
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Met David at the Farmer's Market and bought this book. Good book, nice horror / fantasy book in an interesting setting.
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Night Watch 125085756
"A tour de force." —Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

In 1874, in the wake of the War, erasure, trauma, and namelessness haunt civilians and veterans, renegades and wanderers, freedmen and runaways. Twelve-year-old ConaLee, the adult in her family for as long as she can remember, finds herself on a buckboard journey with her mother, Eliza, who hasn’t spoken in more than a year. They arrive at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, delivered to the hospital’s entrance by a war veteran who has forced himself into their world. There, far from family, a beloved neighbor, and the mountain home they knew, they try to reclaim their lives.

The omnipresent vagaries of war and race rise to the surface as we learn their their flight to the highest mountain ridges of western Virginia; the disappearance of ConaLee’s father, who left for the War and never returned. Meanwhile, in the asylum, they begin to find a new path. ConaLee pretends to be her mother’s maid; Eliza responds slowly to treatment. They get swept up in the life of the facility—the mysterious man they call the Night Watch; the orphan child called Weed; the fearsome woman who runs the kitchen; the remarkable doctor at the head of the institution.

Epic, enthralling, and meticulously crafted, Night Watch is a stunning chronicle of surviving war and its aftermath.]]>
306 Jayne Anne Phillips 0451493346 Kent 4 4.14 2023 Night Watch
author: Jayne Anne Phillips
name: Kent
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/24
date added: 2024/12/17
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<![CDATA[The Threat in the West Indies (The Merriman Chronicles, #2)]]> 22600217 Publishers Updated and re-edited 5th edition - November 2023.The year is 1793 and Captain James Abel Merriman has been sent to the West Indies as Captain of His Majesty’s sloop Aphrodite. Once again seconded to Mr. Grahame of the Revenue Service and under orders of Lord Stevenage of the Treasury Service, they are to discover French and Spanish activities across the islands which will decide their future actions.England's oldest enemy France - now under the control of Napoleon Bonaparte - is in the throes of the revolution and also is at war with Austria and the Netherlands. At this point in history - February 1793 - France declares war on England.In the West Indies, many of the islands had been fought over by the British, the French and the Spanish. The principal islands of St. Lucia, Martinique and Guadeloupe are still in French hands although this may be about to change.]]> 196 Roger Burnage Kent 4 4.29 2014 The Threat in the West Indies (The Merriman Chronicles, #2)
author: Roger Burnage
name: Kent
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/02
date added: 2024/12/17
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<![CDATA[The House in the Cerulean Sea (Cerulean Chronicles, #1)]]> 45047384
Linus Baker leads a quiet, solitary life. At forty, he lives in a tiny house with a devious cat and his old records. As a Case Worker at the Department in Charge Of Magical Youth, he spends his days overseeing the well-being of children in government-sanctioned orphanages.

When Linus is unexpectedly summoned by Extremely Upper Management he's given a curious and highly classified assignment: travel to Marsyas Island Orphanage, where six dangerous children reside: a gnome, a sprite, a wyvern, an unidentifiable green blob, a were-Pomeranian, and the Antichrist. Linus must set aside his fears and determine whether or not they’re likely to bring about the end of days.

But the children aren’t the only secret the island keeps. Their caretaker is the charming and enigmatic Arthur Parnassus, who will do anything to keep his wards safe. As Arthur and Linus grow closer, long-held secrets are exposed, and Linus must make a choice: destroy a home or watch the world burn.

An enchanting story, masterfully told, The House in the Cerulean Sea is about the profound experience of discovering an unlikely family in an unexpected place—and realizing that family is yours.]]>
394 T.J. Klune Kent 4 4.37 2020 The House in the Cerulean Sea (Cerulean Chronicles, #1)
author: T.J. Klune
name: Kent
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/30
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves:
review:
Excellent character development and a truly moving story. I let myself get immersed in the not so realistic story (IMO) but the characters made it all worthwhile. Emotional and uplifting. A good book.
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When Breath Becomes Air 25899336
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a naïve medical student "possessed," as he wrote, "by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life" into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.

What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.

Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. "I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything," he wrote. "Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: 'I can't go on. I'll go on.'" When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.]]>
208 Paul Kalanithi 0812988418 Kent 4 touching-and-tragic 4.41 2016 When Breath Becomes Air
author: Paul Kalanithi
name: Kent
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/17
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: touching-and-tragic
review:

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Intermezzo 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]>
454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Kent 5 great-story 3.86 2024 Intermezzo
author: Sally Rooney
name: Kent
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves: great-story
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Tenth of December 39712929 One of the most important and blazingly original writers of his generation, George Saunders is an undisputed master of the short story, and Tenth of December is his most honest, accessible, and moving collection yet.

In the taut opener, “Victory Lap,� a boy witnesses the attempted abduction of the girl next door and is faced with a harrowing choice: Does he ignore what he sees, or override years of smothering advice from his parents and act? In “Home,� a combat-damaged soldier moves back in with his mother and struggles to reconcile the world he left with the one to which he has returned. And in the title story, a stunning meditation on imagination, memory, and loss, a middle-aged cancer patient walks into the woods to commit suicide, only to encounter a troubled young boy who, over the course of a fateful morning, gives the dying man a final chance to recall who he really is. A hapless, deluded owner of an antiques store; two mothers struggling to do the right thing; a teenage girl whose idealism is challenged by a brutal brush with reality; a man tormented by a series of pharmaceutical experiments that force him to lust, to love, to kill—the unforgettable characters that populate the pages of Tenth of December are vividly and lovingly infused with Saunders’s signature blend of exuberant prose, deep humanity, and stylistic innovation.

Writing brilliantly and profoundly about class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war, Saunders cuts to the core of the contemporary experience. These stories take on the big questions and explore the fault lines of our own morality, delving into the questions of what makes us good and what makes us human.

Unsettling, insightful, and hilarious, the stories in Tenth of December—through their manic energy, their focus on what is redeemable in human beings, and their generosity of spirit—not only entertain and delight; they fulfill Chekhov’s dictum that art should “prepare us for tenderness.”]]>
271 George Saunders Kent 0 currently-reading 4.00 2013 Tenth of December
author: George Saunders
name: Kent
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/02
shelves: currently-reading
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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 Kent 4 3.77 2023 Yellowface
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Kent
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/27
date added: 2024/11/27
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A Visit from the Goon Squad 54083551 NATIONAL BESTSELLER
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
A New York Times Book Review Best Book

One of the Best Books of the Year:
Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, The Daily Beast, The Miami Herald, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Newsday, NPR's On Point, O, the Oprah Magazine, People, Publishers Weekly, Salon, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, Slate, Time, The Washington Post, and Village Voice

Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive.Sasha isthe passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. With music pulsing on every page, A Visit from the Goon Squad is astartling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption.




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328 Jennifer Egan Kent 4 3.82 2010 A Visit from the Goon Squad
author: Jennifer Egan
name: Kent
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/17
date added: 2024/11/17
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1Q84 (1Q84, #1-3) 18626839 The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.

A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is for ‘question mark.� A world that bears a question.� Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.

As Aomame's and Tengo's narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector.

A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell is Haruki Murakami's most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.

This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.]]>
1318 Haruki Murakami Kent 5 What a great book

I wonder why I have never heard of this author. Great, yet unusual, genre neutral, work. Very long, at over 1000 pages, but good I looked forward to reading most days.]]>
4.03 2009 1Q84 (1Q84, #1-3)
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Kent
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/10
date added: 2024/11/10
shelves:
review:
What a great book

I wonder why I have never heard of this author. Great, yet unusual, genre neutral, work. Very long, at over 1000 pages, but good I looked forward to reading most days.
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The Fox Wife 127278666 Some people think foxes are similar to ghosts because we go around collecting qi, but nothing could be further than the truth. We are living creatures, just like you, only usually better looking . . .

Manchuria, 1908.
In the last years of the dying Qing Empire, a courtesan is found frozen in a doorway. Her death is clouded by rumors of foxes, which are believed to lure people by transforming themselves into beautiful women and handsome men. Bao, a detective with an uncanny ability to sniff out the truth, is hired to uncover the dead woman’s identity. Since childhood, Bao has been intrigued by the fox gods, yet they’ve remained tantalizingly out of reach—until, perhaps, now.

Meanwhile, a family who owns a famous Chinese medicine shop can cure ailments but can’t escape the curse that afflicts them—their eldest sons die before their twenty-fourth birthdays. When a disruptively winsome servant named Snow enters their household, the family’s luck seems to change—or does it?

Snow is a creature of many secrets, but most of all she’s a mother seeking vengeance for her lost child. Hunting a murderer, she will follow the trail from northern China to Japan, while Bao follows doggedly behind. Navigating the myths and misconceptions of fox spirits, both Snow and Bao will encounter old friends and new foes, even as more deaths occur.

New York Times bestselling author Yangsze Choo brilliantly explores a world of mortals and spirits, humans and beasts, and their dazzling intersection. Epic in scope and full of singular, unforgettable characters, The Fox Wife is a stunning novel about old loves and second chances, the depths of maternal love, and ancient folktales that may very well be true.]]>
390 Yangsze Choo 1250266017 Kent 5 3.97 2024 The Fox Wife
author: Yangsze Choo
name: Kent
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/12
date added: 2024/10/21
shelves:
review:
I really like this book. The characters, fables and story are highly entertaining. I saw some other reviews, claiming it to be slow, but I thought the pace was perfect.
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Birthright 55849202
Sold off to the Ellington household for a record amount of money, lot 743 is collected by her new Master and taken from the labor colonies all the way to Diamond Woods estates. Where the upper class reigns supreme. Chosen specifically for her trendy genetics to ensure the best looking baby (and boasting rights) to Commander Avery, she begins her journey into her new life as a breeder. Knowing she has no choice but to accept her new position she must find a way to survive, escape, or die trying.

It isn’t long before she is approached by one of the leaders of the resistance. A man named Keller. After noticing lot 743’s uncanny ability to read books (something which is a death sentence for slaves) he mistakenly identifies her as someone who is part of the resistance. That she has a name. Her name is Cordelia. Having no knowledge that a revolution is brewing, Cordelia now has to make a choice. Fight back against the system or remain complacent in her own demise.

The struggle with Avery is real when she finds he’s hiding a dark past. He’s been stripped of his rank for betraying The Leader. A puritanical dictator who rules over the working class and the elites with very specific rules and guidelines. Avery is only surviving on his family name and second chances as he was caught in a romance with the previous purchased breeder and was ordered to execute her by his own hand to prove he was not part of the resistance himself. Full of self loathing and struggling to come to grips with his cowardly mistake, he is bitter and resentful and only knows how to take it out on Cordelia. The only problem is that as bad as Avery treats her...his wife is even worse.

When faced with the decision of a poison dinner and who should ultimately receive the meal, Cordelia makes the bold decision to spare Avery’s life despite his abuse and send his wife to her grave. This stunning and merciful act, going against even the wishes of the resistance itself, sets Avery on the right path. Together, he and Cordelia join forces in order to take down the leader, collapse the elites, and prop Avery back to power. Ushering in a completely new world order of peace, harmony, and equality among men.]]>
380 Nadia Valentine Kent 4 Interesting, A genre bender

It's like Fifty Shades Of Gray meets the Hunger Games. Not a bad union to come up with for a writer. The erotica at the beginning kind of shocked me since it was graphic, but the story turned out to be more than that. A decent read.
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4.80 Birthright
author: Nadia Valentine
name: Kent
average rating: 4.80
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/24
date added: 2024/09/24
shelves:
review:
Interesting, A genre bender

It's like Fifty Shades Of Gray meets the Hunger Games. Not a bad union to come up with for a writer. The erotica at the beginning kind of shocked me since it was graphic, but the story turned out to be more than that. A decent read.

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Kellcey 51606309 364 Kacey Kells Kent 0 4.80 Kellcey
author: Kacey Kells
name: Kent
average rating: 4.80
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/22
date added: 2024/09/22
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<![CDATA[Shadojak (The Daughter of Chaos #2)]]> 30328671
The task before her is only made harder by the inner struggle between herself and the other her - the daughter of Chaos which is battling to take over her soul and conquer both worlds.]]>
478 A.C. Salter Kent 4 4.41 2016 Shadojak (The Daughter of Chaos #2)
author: A.C. Salter
name: Kent
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/21
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves:
review:

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<![CDATA[The Threat in the Baltic (The Merriman Chronicles, #5)]]> 24580922 179 Roger Burnage Kent 4 4.36 2015 The Threat in the Baltic (The Merriman Chronicles, #5)
author: Roger Burnage
name: Kent
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/11
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves:
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Before We Were Yours 33154628 For readers of Orphan Train and The Nightingale comes a “thought-provoking [and] complex tale about two families, two generations apart . . . based on a notorious true-life scandal.�*

Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family’s Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge—until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage, the Foss children are assured that they will soon be returned to their parents—but they quickly realize the dark truth. At the mercy of the facility’s cruel director, Rill fights to keep her sisters and brother together in a world of danger and uncertainty.

Aiken, South Carolina, present day. Born into wealth and privilege, Avery Stafford seems to have it all: a successful career as a federal prosecutor, a handsome fiancé, and a lavish wedding on the horizon. But when Avery returns home to help her father weather a health crisis, a chance encounter leaves her with uncomfortable questions and compels her to take a journey through her family’s long-hidden history, on a path that will ultimately lead either to devastation or to redemption.

Based on one of America’s most notorious real-life scandals—in which Georgia Tann, director of a Memphis-based adoption organization, kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country—Lisa Wingate’s riveting, wrenching, and ultimately uplifting tale reminds us how, even though the paths we take can lead to many places, the heart never forgets where we belong.]]>
378 Lisa Wingate 0425284697 Kent 5 What a great story

Heartbreaking story full of suspense. The telling of this tale in two different time periods is an impressive feat of writing skill. The characters are described and act as expected. Highly recommend.]]>
4.51 2017 Before We Were Yours
author: Lisa Wingate
name: Kent
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/04
date added: 2024/09/04
shelves:
review:
What a great story

Heartbreaking story full of suspense. The telling of this tale in two different time periods is an impressive feat of writing skill. The characters are described and act as expected. Highly recommend.
]]>
<![CDATA[The Threat in the Atlantic (The Merriman Chronicles, #8)]]> 212757859 Hercule has captured numerous British ships near the Cape of Good Hope. Captained by a wily veteran known as the lone wolf, the Hercule presents Merriman with his greatest adversary yet.

Joining his loyal first officer Alfred Shrigley aboard the newly-refitted Thunder, Merriman journeys south to capture or destroy the Hercule. An unexpected diversion leads him onto Portuguese soil and a crucial rendezvous with an old friend � the resourceful double agent, Charles Moreau. With no time to lose, Merriman must meld inexperienced men and hardened veterans into an effective fighting outfit. Along the way, he and his crew encounter slave ships, pirates, disease, storms and numerous allies and enemies before a fateful clash with their elusive nemesis.]]>
290 Robin Burnage Kent 4 4.43 The Threat in the Atlantic (The Merriman Chronicles, #8)
author: Robin Burnage
name: Kent
average rating: 4.43
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/24
date added: 2024/08/24
shelves:
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<![CDATA[The Threat in the Americas (The Merriman Chronicles, #6)]]> 27416378 198 Roger Burnage Kent 4 4.39 The Threat in the Americas (The Merriman Chronicles, #6)
author: Roger Burnage
name: Kent
average rating: 4.39
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/16
date added: 2024/08/16
shelves:
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<![CDATA[The Threat in the East (The Merriman Chronicles, #4)]]> 21071220 215 Roger Burnage Kent 4 4.37 2014 The Threat in the East (The Merriman Chronicles, #4)
author: Roger Burnage
name: Kent
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/08
date added: 2024/08/08
shelves:
review:

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<![CDATA[Merriman and the French Invasion (The Merriman Chronicles, #3)]]> 18907182 278 Roger Burnage Kent 5 4.35 2013 Merriman and the French Invasion (The Merriman Chronicles, #3)
author: Roger Burnage
name: Kent
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/06
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves:
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<![CDATA[A Certain Threat (The Merriman Chronicles, #1)]]> 123257743
Lieutenant James Merriman with his ship, the sloop Aphrodite, is ordered to the Irish Sea to assist the principal Treasury agent Mr. Grahame in this work. Merriman is plunged headlong into the world of espionage and when Grahame is seriously wounded it falls to Merriman to carry on the investigation.

Young James Merriman must keep all his wits about him to foil these plans especially when his adversary is revealed to be an exceptional French agent Henri Moreau who hopes that by helping the Irish to throw off the English yoke, France will be able to use Irish ports from which to attack England.]]>
259 Roger Burnage Kent 4 4.34 2012 A Certain Threat (The Merriman Chronicles, #1)
author: Roger Burnage
name: Kent
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/01
date added: 2024/08/01
shelves:
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The Boys from Biloxi 61065355
Keith Rudy and Hugh Malco grew up in Biloxi in the sixties and were childhood friends, as well as Little League all-stars. But as teenagers, their lives took them in different directions. Keith’s father became a legendary prosecutor, determined to “clean up the Coast.� Hugh’s father became the “Boss� of Biloxi’s criminal underground. Keith went to law school and followed in his father’s footsteps. Hugh preferred the nightlife and worked in his father’s clubs. The two families were headed for a showdown, one that would happen in a courtroom.

Life itself hangs in the balance in The Boys from Biloxi, a sweeping saga rich with history and with a large cast of unforgettable characters.]]>
464 John Grisham 0385548923 Kent 0 to-read 3.81 2022 The Boys from Biloxi
author: John Grisham
name: Kent
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/13
shelves: to-read
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All the Sinners Bleed 61884832 A Black sheriff. A serial killer. A small town ready to combust.

Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, Charon has had only two murders. After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface.

Then a year to the day after Titus’s election, a school teacher is killed by a former student and the student is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies. Those festering secrets are now out in the open and ready to tear the town apart.

As Titus investigates the shootings, he unearths terrible crimes and a serial killer who has been hiding in plain sight, haunting the dirt lanes and woodland clearings of Charon. With the killer’s possible connections to a local church and the town’s harrowing history weighing on him, Titus projects confidence about closing the case while concealing a painful secret from his own past. At the same time, he also has to contend with a far-right group that wants to hold a parade in celebration of the town’s Confederate history.

Powerful and unforgettable, All the Sinners Bleed confirms S. A. Cosby as “one of the most muscular, distinctive, grab-you-by-both-ears voices in American crime fiction� (The Washington Post).]]>
338 S.A. Cosby 1250831911 Kent 0 to-read 4.18 2023 All the Sinners Bleed
author: S.A. Cosby
name: Kent
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/13
shelves: to-read
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The Alchemist 25076674 A special 25th anniversary edition of the extraordinary international bestseller, including a new Foreword by Paulo Coelho.

Combining magic, mysticism, wisdom and wonder into an inspiring tale of self-discovery,The Alchemisthas become a modern classic, selling millions of copies around the world and transforming the lives of countless readers across generations.

Paulo Coelho's masterpiece tells the mystical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure. His quest will lead him to riches far different—and far more satisfying—than he ever imagined. Santiago's journey teaches us about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, of recognizing opportunity and learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, most importantly, to follow our dreams.

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84 Paulo Coelho Kent 5 4.17 1988 The Alchemist
author: Paulo Coelho
name: Kent
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1988
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/12
date added: 2024/07/12
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Hippie 40011494 The worldwide bestseller by the author of The Alchemist takes us on a journey back in time, from South America to Holland to Nepal, drawing on the rich experiences of his own life to relive the dreams of a generation that longs for peace. � "A novelist who writes in a universal language."—Los Angeles Times In Hippie, he tells the story of Paulo, a young, skinny Brazilian man with a goatee and long, flowing hair, who dreams of becoming a writer, and Karla, a Dutch woman in her twenties who has been waiting to find a companion to accompany her on the fabled hippie trail to Nepal. After meeting each other in Amsterdam, she convinces Paulo to join her on a trip aboard the Magic Bus that travels from Amsterdam to Istanbul and across Central Asia to Kathmandu. As they embark on this journey together, Paulo and Karla explore a love affair that awakens them on every level and leads to choices and decisions that will set the course for their lives thereafter.]]> 305 Paulo Coelho Kent 4 3.90 2018 Hippie
author: Paulo Coelho
name: Kent
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/12
date added: 2024/07/12
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Then She Was Gone 36012399 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Jewell—perfect for fans of Paula Hawkins and Liane Moriarty.

Ellie Mack was the perfect daughter. She was fifteen, the youngest of three. She was beloved by her parents, friends, and teachers. She and her boyfriend made a teenaged golden couple. She was days away from an idyllic post-exams summer vacation, with her whole life ahead of her.

And then she was gone.

Now, her mother Laurel Mack is trying to put her life back together. It’s been ten years since her daughter disappeared, seven years since her marriage ended, and only months since the last clue in Ellie’s case was unearthed. So when she meets an unexpectedly charming man in a café, no one is more surprised than Laurel at how quickly their flirtation develops into something deeper. Before she knows it, she’s meeting Floyd’s daughters—and his youngest, Poppy, takes Laurel’s breath away.

Because looking at Poppy is like looking at Ellie. And now, the unanswered questions she’s tried so hard to put to rest begin to haunt Laurel anew. Where did Ellie go? Did she really run away from home, as the police have long suspected, or was there a more sinister reason for her disappearance? Who is Floyd, really? And why does his daughter remind Laurel so viscerally of her own missing girl?]]>
368 Lisa Jewell 1501154664 Kent 5 Outstanding novel

What a ride! Filled with emotions and heart brakes , it is a story of love and loss, twists and turns and a great set of characters. Highly recommend.]]>
4.18 2017 Then She Was Gone
author: Lisa Jewell
name: Kent
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/01
date added: 2024/07/01
shelves:
review:
Outstanding novel

What a ride! Filled with emotions and heart brakes , it is a story of love and loss, twists and turns and a great set of characters. Highly recommend.
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<![CDATA[The Silent Forest (The House on the Hill, #2)]]> 202950161
In New Haven, everything is changing. And there’s no going back now.

It’s been weeks since Allison went missing, and everyone has given up. New Haven mourns their dead as the summer winds down. For a while, things are calm. The Woods family and the whole town are adjusting to life after the tragic summer.

But this is not the end.

When everyone else has given up, Kaia keeps looking. And now, she’s starting to find answers.

While the Woods family adapts to their new visitor, more people around town go missing and the unsolved cases pile up. An older couple, first. Longtime New Haven residents. And then another. Sherif Wheeler starts to crack under the pressure. Time is running out.

Their only hope for answers—Malaki Banks—leaves cryptic clues. Kaia has to confront him again, still haunted by that night in the house. When she does, Malaki gives them a clue that might be the answer to everything.

A new discovery in the forest offers hope. But it also threatens to unbury all of New Haven’s darkest secrets.

For the Woods family, it will take everything they have. For Kaia, it’s the last chance. Their lives and their town will never be the same.]]>
332 David Duane Kummer Kent 5 Good second in a series

Second book did justice to the first. Nice gripping horror and suspense. Highly recommend if you like frightening stories. One more word.]]>
4.32 2024 The Silent Forest (The House on the Hill, #2)
author: David Duane Kummer
name: Kent
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/23
date added: 2024/06/23
shelves:
review:
Good second in a series

Second book did justice to the first. Nice gripping horror and suspense. Highly recommend if you like frightening stories. One more word.
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The Overstory 36075657 An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers—each summoned in different ways by trees—are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest.


In his twelfth novel, National Book Award winner Richard Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.


The Overstory is a book for all readers who despair of humanity’s self-imposed separation from the rest of creation and who hope for the transformative, regenerating possibility of a homecoming. If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us? "Listen. There’s something you need to hear."

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513 Richard Powers 0393635538 Kent 4 4.23 2018 The Overstory
author: Richard Powers
name: Kent
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/21
date added: 2024/06/21
shelves:
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<![CDATA[Checkmate (Blackstone and Prescott #1)]]> 60227307
Serial killers were an obsession of Adam Blackstone. A psychopath himself, the darkness inside him leads him not only to the bodies but into the minds of the killers.

Teamed up with feisty FBI agent Samantha Prescott, Blackstone returns to the city of his birth, Lexington, Kentucky to play an endgame he soon realizes he can’t win…unless he kills. And once he kills, the darkness will consume him and he won’t be able to turn back.]]>
288 Linda S. Prather Kent 4 Not a bad story at all

Not my normal genre but it turned out good. The story, for me, was like a parade of typical cliches, although it entertained. ]]>
4.63 Checkmate (Blackstone and Prescott #1)
author: Linda S. Prather
name: Kent
average rating: 4.63
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/29
date added: 2024/04/29
shelves:
review:
Not a bad story at all

Not my normal genre but it turned out good. The story, for me, was like a parade of typical cliches, although it entertained.
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The Shipping News 59064012 The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel.
Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just deserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Here, on desolate Quoyle's Point, in a house empty except for a few mementos of the family's unsavory past, the battered members of three generations try to cobble up new lives.
Newfoundland is a country of coast and cove where the mercury rarely rises above 70 degrees, the local culinary delicacy is cod cheeks, and it's easier to travel by boat and snowmobile than on anything with wheels. In this harsh place of cruel storms, a collapsing fishery, and chronic unemployment, the aunt sets up as a yacht upholsterer in nearby Killick-Claw, and Quoyle finds a job reporting the shipping news for the local weekly, the Gammy Bird (a paper that specializes in sexual-abuse stories and grisly photos of car accidents).
As the long winter closes its jaws of ice, each of the Quoyles confronts private demons, reels from catastrophe to minor triumph -- in the company of the obsequious Mavis Bangs; Diddy Shovel the strongman; drowned Herald Prowse; cane-twirling Beety; Nutbeem, who steals foreign news from the radio; a demented cousin the aunt refuses to recognize; the much-zippered Alvin Yark; silent Wavey; and old Billy Pretty, with his bag of secrets. By the time of the spring storms Quoyle has learned how to gut cod, to escape from a pickle jar, and to tie a true lover's knot.]]>
354 Annie Proulx Kent 4 4.09 1993 The Shipping News
author: Annie Proulx
name: Kent
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2022/04/08
date added: 2024/04/18
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review:

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<![CDATA[The Campaign of Peerless Kent: Thirty-one-year-old Calabasas resident Peerless Kent is forced into a political deathmatch against one of the most dangerous Congressmen in America.]]> 62116854
He dreams of doing something momentous with his life one day…�.but just hasn’t found the right moment�..until it finds him.

Peerless is bullied into running against Congressman Benjamin Woods.

Congressman Woods has become one of the most feared men in Washington D.C. while staying one of the most loved men in Calabasas.

After only one hour into the campaign that everybody believes is doomed, Peerless is forced to stand in front of a massive crowd at the Calabasas Cowboy Cookout and fight for his life.

On a Campaign trail full of disaster and eventually physical danger the one thing happens to Peerless that he never saw coming, he falls in love with a woman who is deep into Congressman’s Woods inner circle.

Can Peerless Kent win a few votes?

Can he give a speech without being booed or having something thrown at him?

Can he win the heart of the woman of his dreams?

Can he even survive until election night?

As you tag along with Peerless Kent on this journey, you'll laugh and be stunned!]]>
265 Erik Hengstrum Kent 3 4.25 The Campaign of Peerless Kent: Thirty-one-year-old Calabasas resident Peerless Kent is forced into a political deathmatch against one of the most dangerous Congressmen in America.
author: Erik Hengstrum
name: Kent
average rating: 4.25
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/18
date added: 2024/04/18
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<![CDATA[Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow]]> 58916147 A newer cover edition can be found here.

In this exhilarating novel by the best-selling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry two friends--often in love, but never lovers--come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]>
418 Gabrielle Zevin Kent 5 Wow!!

What a great story, A love story, A story of angst. A story that is as unique as Gabrielle made the personalities of each character and then set them with each other to fight petty thoughts and deep emotional parlays into jealousy, happiness, depression and countless other perfectly described emotions. Highly recommend.]]>
4.26 2022 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Kent
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/18
date added: 2024/04/18
shelves:
review:
Wow!!

What a great story, A love story, A story of angst. A story that is as unique as Gabrielle made the personalities of each character and then set them with each other to fight petty thoughts and deep emotional parlays into jealousy, happiness, depression and countless other perfectly described emotions. Highly recommend.
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Six Feet Deep 49463153 12 Jonathan Finch Kent 5 5.00 Six Feet Deep
author: Jonathan Finch
name: Kent
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/18
date added: 2024/03/18
shelves:
review:

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<![CDATA[Eversong (The Daughter of Chaos #1)]]> 34867856
'When the darkness whispers her name - Run!'
]]>
499 A.C. Salter Kent 4 A good read

The creation of another believable world is never easy, but it happened in this book. The story moved along at a good pace and I wss pleased to see some change ups in the plot to keep me on edge.

It is a story for those that enjoy fantasy. The only critique may be just me, but I always look for a greater purpose or revealed meaning in the story, which I didn't find in this book.]]>
4.08 2016 Eversong (The Daughter of Chaos #1)
author: A.C. Salter
name: Kent
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/18
date added: 2024/03/18
shelves:
review:
A good read

The creation of another believable world is never easy, but it happened in this book. The story moved along at a good pace and I wss pleased to see some change ups in the plot to keep me on edge.

It is a story for those that enjoy fantasy. The only critique may be just me, but I always look for a greater purpose or revealed meaning in the story, which I didn't find in this book.
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<![CDATA[The Frugal Book Promoter - 3rd Edition: How to get nearly free publicity on your own or by partnering with your publisher]]> 52882393 The Frugal Book Promoter assures your book gets the best possible start in life, whether your publisher assigns zero dollars or thousands to your book’s marketing campaign. A former publicist, the author provides no-nonsense basics to build the essentials you need to build a time-saving social media campaign and knock’em dead lists of influencers that will be more effective than anything you could buy. Pick and choose from dozens of ideas for promotions that she developed or refined through extensive (and award-winning) book campaigns of her own. Several will match your pocketbook and personality.

"The most expensive part of book promotion are the mistakes. This book will save you time and money."
--Dan Poynter, legendary author of The Self-Publishing Manual

"Carolyn Howard-Johnson’s Frugal Book Promoter is... a classic!"
--Bookbaby

"[Carolyn Howard-Johnson is] an incessant promoter who develops and shares new approaches for book promotion."
--Marilyn Ross, founder, Small Publishers of North America and coauthor of The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing

"The Frugal Book Promoter has given me ideas that would never have occurred to me and has changed the way I think about book promotion."
-- Mark Logie, award-winning poet and short-story writer

Carolyn Howard-Johnson (is a multi award-winning author of both fiction and nonfiction. She is a former publicist for a New York PR firm and a marketing instructor for the UCLA Extension Writers� Program. She has appeared on hundreds of TV and radio stations both nationally and locally, and her poetry, essays, columns and stories are published frequently in journals and on the web. She admits to loving marketing almost as much as she loves writing.

From Modern History Press]]>
293 Carolyn Howard-Johnson Kent 0 currently-reading 4.17 The Frugal Book Promoter - 3rd Edition: How to get nearly free publicity on your own or by partnering with your publisher
author: Carolyn Howard-Johnson
name: Kent
average rating: 4.17
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/12
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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Unsheltered 38313843
How could two hardworking people do everything right in life, a woman asks, and end up destitute? Willa Knox and her husband followed all the rules as responsible parents and professionals, and have nothing to show for it but debts and an inherited brick house that is falling apart. The magazine where Willa worked has folded; the college where her husband had tenure has closed. Their dubious shelter is also the only option for a disabled father-in-law and an exasperating, free-spirited daughter. When the family’s one success story, an Ivy-educated son, is uprooted by tragedy he seems likely to join them, with dark complications of his own.

In another time, a troubled husband and public servant asks, How can a man tell the truth, and be reviled for it? A science teacher with a passion for honest investigation, Thatcher Greenwood finds himself under his employer forbids him to speak of the exciting work just published by Charles Darwin. His young bride and social-climbing mother-in-law bristle at the risk of scandal, and dismiss his worries that their elegant house is unsound. In a village ostensibly founded as a benevolent Utopia, Thatcher wants only to honor his duties, but his friendships with a woman scientist and a renegade newspaper editor threaten to draw him into a vendetta with the town’s powerful men.

Unsheltered is the compulsively readable story of two families, in two centuries, who live at the corner of Sixth and Plum in Vineland, New Jersey, navigating what seems to be the end of the world as they know it. With history as their tantalizing canvas, these characters paint a startlingly relevant portrait of life in precarious times when the foundations of the past have failed to prepare us for the future.]]>
508 Barbara Kingsolver 0062684744 Kent 4 3.96 2018 Unsheltered
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Kent
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/12
date added: 2024/02/12
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<![CDATA[The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store]]> 85148114
As these characters� 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 Kent 5 4.25 2023 The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
author: James McBride
name: Kent
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/28
date added: 2024/01/28
shelves:
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Above the Flower Shop 54302476 337 William Still Lodge Kent 3 abandoned
The book was well written: diction, narrative, dialog, descriptions were all spot on.

The book, being a romance, was sickenly sweet, syrupy in places making me feel sticky after reading. Nothing wrong with that, if that is what you like, but it is not a fit for me.

The basic plot was a bit cliche, but it worked fairly well.]]>
4.00 Above the Flower Shop
author: William Still Lodge
name: Kent
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/06
date added: 2024/01/06
shelves: abandoned
review:
I wasn't quite sure what genre this book was in until I hit it about midway through. I'm not a big fan of romance, so I dropped it after around 60% read. My comments:

The book was well written: diction, narrative, dialog, descriptions were all spot on.

The book, being a romance, was sickenly sweet, syrupy in places making me feel sticky after reading. Nothing wrong with that, if that is what you like, but it is not a fit for me.

The basic plot was a bit cliche, but it worked fairly well.
]]>
Demon Copperhead 60317128 Demon Copperhead is set in the mountains of southern Appalachia. It's the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.]]>
550 Barbara Kingsolver Kent 5 4.58 2022 Demon Copperhead
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Kent
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/23
date added: 2023/12/23
shelves:
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<![CDATA[The Eldritch Tome: Volume I (Eldritch Saga Book 1)]]> 179941118 Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Berserk, and Mistborn series.

The world of Eriand prospers at the dusk of an age. Rig, a young man from the snowy northern country of Nordfold is freshly released from his conscription to the kingdom. When the game in the forested countryside becomes scarce, he is forced to consider other options. What should have been a simple journey to the capital city becomes a prophetic call to arms with destiny. Rig breaks the cycle of his mundane life and is thrust into an arduous journey where he must brave the dangers of a world full of insurmountable foes and powerful magics and the Eldritch Tome, a primordial relic of vast power, rests at the heart of it all. What secrets does the Eldritch Tome hold and what fate will befall Eriand should the wrong hands find it? Where will this journey take Rig and what will he have to sacrifice to survive and find it? Prepare to embark on a tale for the ages; one that is of the bleakness of reality woven with the love and passion of existence.]]>
432 Stephen Blumberg Kent 4 Nice fantasy warrior read

This was a good story. A bit long, but good. The author writes well, so the story is easy to follow and had enough captivating to keep a reader reading.]]>
4.74 The Eldritch Tome: Volume I (Eldritch Saga Book 1)
author: Stephen Blumberg
name: Kent
average rating: 4.74
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/01
date added: 2023/11/01
shelves:
review:
Nice fantasy warrior read

This was a good story. A bit long, but good. The author writes well, so the story is easy to follow and had enough captivating to keep a reader reading.
]]>
<![CDATA[The Killing Dance (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #6)]]> 30244 368 Laurell K. Hamilton 0425209067 Kent 1 4.14 1997 The Killing Dance (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #6)
author: Laurell K. Hamilton
name: Kent
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1997
rating: 1
read at: 2010/01/01
date added: 2023/10/21
shelves:
review:

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<![CDATA[The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer #1)]]> 58111375 The Sympathizer is the breakthrough novel of the year. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Saul Bellow, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a “man of two minds,� a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping espionage novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.]]> 445 Viet Thanh Nguyen Kent 4 4.16 2015 The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer #1)
author: Viet Thanh Nguyen
name: Kent
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/12
date added: 2023/09/12
shelves:
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Stormy Weather (Skink #3) 13061
"Hysterically funny...Hiaasen at his satirical best." - USA Today

Two honeymooners wake up early, make love twice, and brace themselves for a spectacle they won't be watching from the sidelines. A seductive con artiste stumbles into a scam that promises more cool cash than the lottery. A shotgun-toting mobile home salesman is about to close a deal with disaster. A law school dropout will be chasing one Gaboon viper, a troop of storm-shocked monkeys, and a newfound love life, while tourists by the thousands bail from the Florida Keys. We're now entering the hurricane zone, where hell and hilarity rule. And in the hands of the masterful, merciless Carl Hiaasen, we're going to have some weather.]]>
388 Carl Hiaasen 0446677167 Kent 4 3.94 1995 Stormy Weather (Skink #3)
author: Carl Hiaasen
name: Kent
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/07/29
shelves:
review:

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The Ascendants: Bloodlines 60233590
After centuries of fighting, he believes this resource will give him the advantage needed to defeat the benevolent Genoshian Empire once and for all. Earth finds themselves stuck in the middle of a deadly war that they are ill-equipped to handle.

Earth’s only hope is the superhero faction known as The Ascendants. Scattered and fractured by previous events, the Ascendants find themselves outclassed by a much deadlier opponent. The heroes of Earth must unite if they are to have any chance of defeating this galactic force.]]>
101 Christian Green Kent 5 Super hero does it

Nice to see a black super hero save the day. This story needs some nice graphics, like a good comic book has, just to flesh out the details for the reader.]]>
4.81 2022 The Ascendants: Bloodlines
author: Christian Green
name: Kent
average rating: 4.81
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/03
date added: 2023/07/03
shelves:
review:
Super hero does it

Nice to see a black super hero save the day. This story needs some nice graphics, like a good comic book has, just to flesh out the details for the reader.
]]>
Someone Else's Shoes 62002001 A story of mix-ups, mess-ups and making the most of second chances, this is the new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Jojo Moyes, author of Me Before You and The Giver of Stars.

Who are you when you are forced to walk in someone else’s shoes?

Nisha Cantor lives the globetrotting life of the seriously wealthy, until her husband announces a divorce and cuts her off. Nisha is determined to hang onto her glamorous life. But in the meantime, she must scramble to cope--she doesn’t even have the shoes she was, until a moment ago, standing in.

That’s because Sam Kemp � in the bleakest point of her life � has accidentally taken Nisha’s gym bag. But Sam hardly has time to worry about a lost gym bag--she’s struggling to keep herself and her family afloat. When she tries on Nisha’s six-inch high Christian Louboutin red crocodile shoes, the resulting jolt of confidence that makes her realize something must change—and that thing is herself.

Full of Jojo Moyes� signature humor, brilliant storytelling, and warmth, Someone Else’s Shoes is a story about how just one little thing can suddenly change everything.]]>
447 Jojo Moyes 1984879308 Kent 5 Wonderful story

Fast paced, lots of suspense, humor, tragedy, and enduring friendships make this book a must read. Well done. More of a Chick Lit book, but it was entertaining for this guy too.]]>
4.21 2023 Someone Else's Shoes
author: Jojo Moyes
name: Kent
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/25
date added: 2023/06/25
shelves:
review:
Wonderful story

Fast paced, lots of suspense, humor, tragedy, and enduring friendships make this book a must read. Well done. More of a Chick Lit book, but it was entertaining for this guy too.
]]>
<![CDATA[Juni-Q and the Secrecy of Desire (The Eyes of Juni-Q #1)]]> 157677821 284 Julian Martin Kent 4 A mass of Dopamine fueled adventures

I'm not sure what to think of this book-the word grunge or punk comes to mind. A wild romp of sex, drugs, strange friends and a story that hops back and sideways but eventually ends. Not a book for everyone, but worth a look.]]>
4.50 Juni-Q and the Secrecy of Desire (The Eyes of Juni-Q #1)
author: Julian Martin
name: Kent
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/29
date added: 2023/05/29
shelves:
review:
A mass of Dopamine fueled adventures

I'm not sure what to think of this book-the word grunge or punk comes to mind. A wild romp of sex, drugs, strange friends and a story that hops back and sideways but eventually ends. Not a book for everyone, but worth a look.
]]>
<![CDATA[The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue]]> 123739932 A Life No One Will Remember. A Story You Will Never Forget.

France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever—and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets.

Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world.

But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.

In the vein of The Time Traveler's Wife and Life After Life, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is New York Times bestselling author V. E. Schwab's #1 New York Times Bestselling Author genre-defying tour de force.]]>
434 Victoria E. Schwab Kent 5 Interesting concept and well done

The description before I got the book regarding someone that no one remembered for 300 years until one day someone does remember, fascinated me. The story, based on that last sentence is what its all about. A well written and interesting account.]]>
4.22 2020 The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
author: Victoria E. Schwab
name: Kent
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/12
date added: 2023/05/12
shelves:
review:
Interesting concept and well done

The description before I got the book regarding someone that no one remembered for 300 years until one day someone does remember, fascinated me. The story, based on that last sentence is what its all about. A well written and interesting account.
]]>
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 Kent 4 A different sort of read

Donna Harry is a talented writer. This is the third novel I've read of hers. The detail and imagery is exquisite but the story is not quite as good a My Little Friend or The Goldfinch, but it was still good.]]>
3.93 1992 The Secret History
author: Donna Tartt
name: Kent
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/12
date added: 2023/03/12
shelves:
review:
A different sort of read

Donna Harry is a talented writer. This is the third novel I've read of hers. The detail and imagery is exquisite but the story is not quite as good a My Little Friend or The Goldfinch, but it was still good.
]]>
A fine day in March 60631735 161 Bree Nan 3969770289 Kent 5 Gripping YA novel

A frank look at high school cruelty and its consequences, including suicide and the effects of those close to the victim.]]>
4.83 A fine day in March
author: Bree Nan
name: Kent
average rating: 4.83
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/29
date added: 2023/01/29
shelves:
review:
Gripping YA novel

A frank look at high school cruelty and its consequences, including suicide and the effects of those close to the victim.
]]>
Water for Elephants 43641
Beautifully written, Water for Elephants is illuminated by a wonderful sense of time and place. It tells a story of a love between two people that overcomes incredible odds in a world in which even love is a luxury that few can afford.]]>
368 Sara Gruen 1565125606 Kent 4 4.11 2006 Water for Elephants
author: Sara Gruen
name: Kent
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/01/16
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<![CDATA[The Passenger (The Passenger #1)]]> 60581087
Traversing the American South, from the garrulous barrooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.]]>
385 Cormac McCarthy 0593535227 Kent 4 3.58 2022 The Passenger (The Passenger #1)
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Kent
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/09
date added: 2023/01/09
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A Man Without a Country 35257125 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER •“For all those who have lived with Vonnegut in their imaginations . . . this is what he is like in person.�–USA Today In a volume that is penetrating, introspective, incisive, and laugh-out-loud funny, one of the great men of letters of this age–or any age–holds forth on life, art, sex, politics, and the state of America’s soul. From his coming of age in America, to his formative war experiences, to his life as an artist, this is Vonnegut doing what he does Being himself. Whimsically illustrated by the author, A Man Without a Country is intimate, tender, and brimming with the scope of Kurt Vonnegut’s passions.Praise for A Man Without a Country“[This] may be as close as Vonnegut ever comes to a memoir.�Los Angeles Times“Like [that of] his literary ancestor Mark Twain, [Kurt Vonnegut’s] crankiness is good-humored and sharp-witted. . . . [ReadingA Man Without a Countryis] like sitting down on the couch for a long chat with an old friend.�–The New York Times Book Review “Filled with [Vonnegut’s] usual contradictory mix of joy and sorrow, hope and despair, humor and gravity.�–Chicago Tribune “Fans will linger on every word . . . as once again [Vonnegut] captures the complexity of the human condition with stunning calligraphic simplicity.�–The Australian “Thank God, Kurt Vonnegut has broken his promise that he will never write another book. In this wondrous assemblage of mini-memoirs, we discover his family’s legacy and his obstinate, unfashionable humanism.�–Studs Terkel]]> 104 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 0525510133 Kent 4 4.37 2005 A Man Without a Country
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Kent
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2022/10/31
date added: 2022/10/31
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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 Kent 5 Marvelous Story

1950's were a way different time, especially for women and minorities. This story clearly demonstrates this cultural divide in a quirky tale of science.]]>
4.47 2022 Lessons in Chemistry
author: Bonnie Garmus
name: Kent
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/10/30
date added: 2022/10/30
shelves:
review:
Marvelous Story

1950's were a way different time, especially for women and minorities. This story clearly demonstrates this cultural divide in a quirky tale of science.
]]>
The Last Green Valley 55961582 Beneath a Scarlet Sky comes a new historical novel inspired by one family’s incredible story of daring, survival, and triumph.

In late March 1944, as Stalin’s forces push into Ukraine, young Emil and Adeline Martel must make a terrible decision: Do they wait for the Soviet bear’s intrusion and risk being sent to Siberia? Or do they reluctantly follow the wolves—murderous Nazi officers who have pledged to protect “pure-blood� Germans?

The Martels are one of many families of German heritage whose ancestors have farmed in Ukraine for more than a century. But after already living under Stalin’s horrifying regime, Emil and Adeline decide they must run in retreat from their land with the wolves they despise to escape the Soviets and go in search of freedom.

Caught between two warring forces and overcoming horrific trials to pursue their hope of immigrating to the West, the Martels� story is a brutal, complex, and ultimately triumphant tale that illuminates the extraordinary power of love, faith, and one family’s incredible will to survive and see their dreams realized.]]>
423 Mark T. Sullivan 1503955370 Kent 4 4.53 2021 The Last Green Valley
author: Mark T. Sullivan
name: Kent
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2022/10/06
date added: 2022/10/06
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<![CDATA[Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #1)]]> 30918623
But Gamache knows that evil is lurking somewhere behind the white picket fences and that, if he watches closely enough, Three Pines will start to give up its dark secrets...]]>
321 Louise Penny Kent 3 4.12 2005 Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #1)
author: Louise Penny
name: Kent
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 2022/09/17
date added: 2022/09/17
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<![CDATA[The Drawing of the Three (The Dark Tower, #2)]]> 28253762 529 Stephen King 1501141392 Kent 4 4.32 1987 The Drawing of the Three (The Dark Tower, #2)
author: Stephen King
name: Kent
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1987
rating: 4
read at: 2020/11/21
date added: 2022/08/22
shelves:
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<![CDATA[The Ocean at the End of the Lane]]> 57281804 ASIN moved from less recent edition

Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.

A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.]]>
259 Neil Gaiman Kent 5 4.22 2013 The Ocean at the End of the Lane
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Kent
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2021/04/24
date added: 2022/08/22
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The Night Watchman 51058205 Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.

Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new “emancipation� bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn’t about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a “termination� that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans “for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run�?

Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice’s shameful alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, who moved to the big city of Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn’t been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life.

Thomas and Patrice live in this impoverished reservation community along with young Chippewa boxer Wood Mountain and his mother Juggie Blue, her niece and Patrice’s best friend Valentine, and Stack Barnes, the white high school math teacher and boxing coach who is hopelessly in love with Patrice.

In the Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich creates a fictional world populated with memorable characters who are forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature. Illuminating the loves and lives, the desires and ambitions of these characters with compassion, wit, and intelligence, The Night Watchman is a majestic work of fiction from this revered cultural treasure.

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464 Louise Erdrich Kent 4 4.27 2020 The Night Watchman
author: Louise Erdrich
name: Kent
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2022/07/17
date added: 2022/08/22
shelves:
review:

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<![CDATA[Collecting Death (Haunted Collection, #1)]]> 51060411
Overcome with rage and guilt, Victor teams up with a paranormal expert to track down the origins of the strange toy. And together they discover a tangled web of haunted collectibles and bloodshed, all pointing towards one man—Stefan Korzh�

A tragic childhood and a mansion filled with haunted antiques have driven Stefan mad. Each cursed item in his ancestral home carries a legacy of terror and death. Now, he seeks to unleash his family’s haunted collection upon the world, spreading chaos and fear.

Time is running out, and Victor is the only one who can stop this madman’s diabolical game. But how far will Victor go to find justice for his wife?

And will he make the ultimate sacrifice to save the lives of countless others?]]>
201 Ron Ripley Kent 4 4.07 Collecting Death (Haunted Collection, #1)
author: Ron Ripley
name: Kent
average rating: 4.07
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2022/04/23
date added: 2022/04/23
shelves:
review:

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Burrangong Creek 56590884
Full credit to the author for producing a uniquely outstanding novel. Five stars. Alice Pickard � author.

What a story � amazing! Leon Hayes - author

Young, population 7,170, straddling Burrangong Creek. Small town Australia. Orderly, peaceful and struggling. Jack, his partner Jessica and Jessica's daughter Sophie move into Young, recruiting young Josh on the way. There they ignite a drug war beyond the capabilities of Young police to control. Senior Constable Luke Scott tries his best, but as this war becomes ever more dangerous, Luke's best might not be enough.]]>
237 Mark Morey 0648786951 Kent 2 abandoned 4.33 Burrangong Creek
author: Mark Morey
name: Kent
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2022/03/20
date added: 2022/03/20
shelves: abandoned
review:

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Spells for Forgetting 59559145
August knows he is not welcome on Saoirse, not after the night everything changed. As a fire raged on at the Salt family orchard, Lily Morgan was found dead in the dark woods, shaking the bedrock of their tight-knit community and branding August a murderer. When he returns to bury his mother’s ashes, he must confront the people who turned their backs on him and face the one wound from his past that has never healed—Emery. But the town has more than one reason to want August gone, and the emergence of deep betrayals and hidden promises spanning generations threaten to reveal the truth behind Lily’s mysterious death once and for all.]]>
351 Adrienne Young 0593358511 Kent 0 to-read 3.85 2022 Spells for Forgetting
author: Adrienne Young
name: Kent
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/03/11
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[Midnight at the Blackbird Café]]> 42435479 Добре дошли в Уиклоу, Алабама � очарователно южняшко градче, закътано в сянката на планините, където хората са сърдечни, а от витрината на кафене „Черният дрозд� се носи ароматът на знаменития вълшебен пай.

Анна Кейт пристига в Уиклоу за погребението на баба си Зий, собственичка на кафенето, и за да сложи в ред делата Ӝ, преди да продължи по пътя си. Израснала далеч от градчето, тя няма намерение да се задържа или пък да се сближава с леко смахнатите му жители. И особено с роднините на баща си, когото никога не е познавала.

За нейна изненада, завещанието на Зий обаче идва с условия � Анна Кейт ще трябва да остане в Уиклоу поне два месеца и да управлява любимото на всички кафене „Черният дрозд�.

Младата жена скоро ще научи, че миналото крие редица неразплетени загадки, сред които е и истината за случилото се с баща Ӝ, причината майка Ӝ да избяга от градчето� а също и тайната на прословутия дроздов пай.
Може би когато открие отговора, Анна Кейт ще знае дали иска да остане, или да отлети.]]>
329 Heather Webber Kent 4 It is Chick lit for sure

Well written, a decent story, but so sappy, I feel sticky after finishing. This book is all about love, love lost, love gained, love between people, around people, around a cafe, a town, a mystery. That is the book in a nutshell.]]>
4.21 2019 Midnight at the Blackbird Café
author: Heather Webber
name: Kent
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2022/03/08
shelves:
review:
It is Chick lit for sure

Well written, a decent story, but so sappy, I feel sticky after finishing. This book is all about love, love lost, love gained, love between people, around people, around a cafe, a town, a mystery. That is the book in a nutshell.
]]>
The Sportswriter 10223049 In this “powerful� blockbuster of a novel (The New York Times), the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Independence Day introduces his most beloved character, failed novelist turned sportswriter Frank Bascombe, during an Easter weekend, as he moves through the great losses of his life.As a sportswriter, Frank Bascombe makes his living studying people—men, mostly—who live entirely within themselves. This is a condition that Frank himself aspires to. But at thirty-eight, he suffers from incurable dreaminess, occasional pounding of the heart, and the not-too-distant losses of a career, a son, and a marriage. In the course of the Easter week in which Ford's moving novel transpires, Bascombe will end up losing the remnants of his familiar life, though with his spirits soaring.]]> 386 Richard Ford 0307763706 Kent 2 abandoned 3.64 1986 The Sportswriter
author: Richard Ford
name: Kent
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1986
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2022/02/20
shelves: abandoned
review:
Way too much self absorption. I kept waiting for the story to take off, but about half way through, I realized it was going to be more internal dialog self analysis of stuff that no one wants to hear.
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NOS4A2 44581151 The spine-tingling, bone-chilling novel of supernatural suspense from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of "The Fireman" and "Horns" - now an AMC original series starring Zachary Quinto, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Ashleigh Cummings.

Victoria McQueen has an uncanny knack for finding things: a misplaced bracelet, a missing photograph, answers to unanswerable questions. When she rides her bicycle over the rickety old covered bridge in the woods near her house, she always emerges in the places she needs to be.

Charles Talent Manx has a gift of his own. He likes to take children for rides in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith with the vanity plate NOS4A2. In the Wraith, he and his innocent guests can slip out of the everyday world and onto hidden roads that lead to an astonishing playground of amusements he calls Christmasland. The journey across the highway of Charlie's twisted imagination transforms his precious passengers, leaving them as terrifying and unstoppable as their benefactor.

Then comes the day when Vic goes looking for trouble... and finds her way to Charlie. That was a lifetime ago. Now, the only kid ever to escape Charlie's evil is all grown up and desperate to forget. But Charlie Manx hasn't stopped thinking about Victoria McQueen. On the road again, he won't slow down until he's taken his revenge. He's after something very special—something Vic can never replace.

As a life-and-death battle of wills builds, Vic McQueen prepares to destroy Charlie once and for all—or die trying.]]>
995 Joe Hill Kent 4 4.22 2013 NOS4A2
author: Joe Hill
name: Kent
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2021/04/11
date added: 2022/02/20
shelves:
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Chasing Fireflies 18929722 They have one summer to find what was lost long ago.


"Never settle for less than the truth," she told him. But when you don't even know your real name, the truth gets a little complicated. It can nestle so close to home it's hard to see. It can even flourish inside a lie. And as Chase Walker discovered, learning the truth about who you are can be as elusive—and as magical—as chasing fireflies on a summer night.

A haunting story about fishing, baseball, home cooking, and other matters of life and death.]]>
349 Charles Martin Kent 4 4.48 2007 Chasing Fireflies
author: Charles Martin
name: Kent
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/01
date added: 2022/01/01
shelves:
review:

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The Graveyard Book 6746355
Can a boy raised by ghosts face the wonders and terrors of the worlds of both the living and the dead? And then there are beings such as ghouls that aren't really one thing or the other.

The Graveyard Book won the Newbery Medal and the Carnegie Medal and is a Hugo Award Winner for Best Novel.]]>
325 Neil Gaiman 0061972657 Kent 5 4.39 2008 The Graveyard Book
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Kent
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2021/12/24
date added: 2021/12/24
shelves:
review:

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The Dutch House 44569767 The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another. It is this unshakeable bond between them that both saves their lives and thwarts their futures.

Set over the course of five decades,The Dutch Houseis a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past. Despite every outward sign of success, Danny and Maeve are only truly comfortable when they’re together. Throughout their lives they return to the well-worn story of what they’ve lost with humor and rage. But when at last they’re forced to confront the people who left them behind, the relationship between an indulged brother and his ever-protective sister is finally tested.

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353 Ann Patchett 0062963694 Kent 4 4.25 2019 The Dutch House
author: Ann Patchett
name: Kent
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2021/11/25
date added: 2021/11/25
shelves:
review:

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<![CDATA[Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life]]> 19426582
Ο Τομ Ρόμπινς, μας υποδέχεται στα ιδιαίτερά του, φιλεύοντάς μας μ' ένα κομμάτι θιβετιανής ροδακινόπιτας. Μόνο αφού τη φάμε, καταλαβαίνουμε ότι δεν είναι μια κοινή ροδακινόπιτα.

Το ευφάνταστο χιούμορ του, η αστείρευτη λογοθήκη του, η ασταμάτητη "τρελή σοφία" του ξεχύνονται μέσ' απ' την αφήγησή του και μας κατακλύζουν, μας εντυπωσιάζουν, μας διασκεδάζουν και μας κάνουν να πιστέψουμε, εν τέλει, πως ε, ναι! πίσω από τα μυθιστορήματα που λατρέψαμε δεν θα μπορούσε να βρίσκεται παρά μόνος κάποιος με μια τέτοια ζωή, τη ζωή του Τομ Ρόμπινς.

Ιδού, λοιπόν, ο συγγραφέας.]]>
389 Tom Robbins Kent 5 Learned a lot about Tom that I had no idea

Did you know this man who writes irreverent books, comical in nature, steamed in carnal acts of hedonism, mocking at the feet of deities, is almost 90 years old? Wow, the term young at heart certainly applies. Just as philosophical, just as free spirited at age 80, when he wore these memories between age 5 and present, he shows himself to be one of a kind.]]>
4.09 2014 Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life
author: Tom Robbins
name: Kent
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2021/11/04
date added: 2021/11/04
shelves:
review:
Learned a lot about Tom that I had no idea

Did you know this man who writes irreverent books, comical in nature, steamed in carnal acts of hedonism, mocking at the feet of deities, is almost 90 years old? Wow, the term young at heart certainly applies. Just as philosophical, just as free spirited at age 80, when he wore these memories between age 5 and present, he shows himself to be one of a kind.
]]>
<![CDATA[Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview (Kindle Single)]]> 22032559 80 Mara Altman Kent 5 Tom Robbins is 82! Hard to believe.

Fascinating look at an extremely nimble mind that erupts every so often in comedic uniqueness. Tom Robbins' philosophies on life, the art of writing, and ways to expand closed minds are overdue in society. I suggest we open a bottle of champagne, pop a magic mushroom cap in the mouth and swill it down with bubbly to start a reassessment of our culture. This book is a must read for fans, or a starting off point for the uninitiated.]]>
4.14 2014 Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview (Kindle Single)
author: Mara Altman
name: Kent
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2021/10/12
date added: 2021/10/12
shelves:
review:
Tom Robbins is 82! Hard to believe.

Fascinating look at an extremely nimble mind that erupts every so often in comedic uniqueness. Tom Robbins' philosophies on life, the art of writing, and ways to expand closed minds are overdue in society. I suggest we open a bottle of champagne, pop a magic mushroom cap in the mouth and swill it down with bubbly to start a reassessment of our culture. This book is a must read for fans, or a starting off point for the uninitiated.
]]>
Middlesex 6624506 A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides--the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl.

In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond clasmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them--along with Callie's failure to develop--leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.

The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia- back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie's grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly a hermaphrodite.

Spanning eight decades--and one unusually awkward adolescence- Jeffrey Eugenides's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America's best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker.

Middlesex is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.]]>
544 Jeffrey Eugenides 1429956275 Kent 5 Not what I expected, surprisingly fulfilling.

I always like to read Pulitzer prize winners to see talent in both the story and the writing. This was an interesting story with a healthy backstory to move it along. Believable with great descriptive scenes it is certainly a prize winner.]]>
4.27 2002 Middlesex
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Kent
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at: 2021/10/10
date added: 2021/10/10
shelves:
review:
Not what I expected, surprisingly fulfilling.

I always like to read Pulitzer prize winners to see talent in both the story and the writing. This was an interesting story with a healthy backstory to move it along. Believable with great descriptive scenes it is certainly a prize winner.
]]>
Wayward (Wayward Pines, #2) 19438157 311 Blake Crouch Kent 4 4.21 2013 Wayward (Wayward Pines, #2)
author: Blake Crouch
name: Kent
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2021/06/03
date added: 2021/06/03
shelves:
review:

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The Night Circus 11506091 Two starcrossed magicians engage in a deadly game of cunning in The Night Circus, the spellbinding bestseller that has captured the world's imagination.

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night.

But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway: a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them both, this is a game in which only one can be left standing. Despite the high stakes, Celia and Marco soon tumble headfirst into love, setting off a domino effect of dangerous consequences, and leaving the lives of everyone, from the performers to the patrons, hanging in the balance.]]>
401 Erin Morgenstern Kent 5 A book of fantasy and fancy

The difference between illusionist, and magician plays out wonderfully in this mystical love story. Just be read to appreciate. Excellent.]]>
4.11 2011 The Night Circus
author: Erin Morgenstern
name: Kent
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2021/05/25
date added: 2021/05/25
shelves:
review:
A book of fantasy and fancy

The difference between illusionist, and magician plays out wonderfully in this mystical love story. Just be read to appreciate. Excellent.
]]>
Gilead 6081296 A New York Times Top-Ten Book of 2004
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction

Nearly 25 years after Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson returns with an intimate tale of three generations, from the Civil War to the 20th century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America's heart. Gilead tells the story of America and will break your heart.]]>
289 Marilynne Robinson Kent 0 abandoned 4.02 2004 Gilead
author: Marilynne Robinson
name: Kent
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at: 2021/03/23
date added: 2021/03/23
shelves: abandoned
review:

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Black Buck 54049697
There’s nothing like a Black salesman on a mission.

An unambitious twenty-two-year-old, Darren lives in a Bed-Stuy brownstone with his mother, who wants nothing more than to see him live up to his potential as the valedictorian of Bronx Science. But Darren is content working at Starbucks in the lobby of a Midtown office building, hanging out with his girlfriend, Soraya, and eating his mother’s home-cooked meals. All that changes when a chance encounter with Rhett Daniels, the silver-tongued CEO of Sumwun, NYC’s hottest tech startup, results in an exclusive invitation for Darren to join an elite sales team on the thirty-sixth floor.

After enduring a “hell week� of training, Darren, the only Black person in the company, reimagines himself as “Buck,� a ruthless salesman unrecognizable to his friends and family.But when things turn tragic at home and Buck feels he’s hit rock bottom, he begins to hatch a plan to help young people of color infiltrate America’s sales force, setting off a chain of events that forever changes the game.

Black Buck is a hilarious, razor-sharp skewering of America’s workforce; it is a propulsive, crackling debut that explores ambition and race, and makes way for a necessary new vision of the American dream.]]>
389 Mateo Askaripour 0358380642 Kent 4 3.85 2021 Black Buck
author: Mateo Askaripour
name: Kent
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/02/27
date added: 2021/02/27
shelves:
review:

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<![CDATA[The Little Friend (Vintage Contemporaries)]]> 13125749
The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents� yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet—unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town’s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family’s history of loss.]]>
642 Donna Tartt Kent 5 3.73 2002 The Little Friend (Vintage Contemporaries)
author: Donna Tartt
name: Kent
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at: 2021/02/11
date added: 2021/02/11
shelves:
review:

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Diary 6584536 272 Chuck Palahniuk Kent 4 3.81 2003 Diary
author: Chuck Palahniuk
name: Kent
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2020/11/13
date added: 2020/11/13
shelves:
review:

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The 7th Canon 30633500 A riveting legal thriller from Robert Dugoni, New York Times bestselling author of My Sister’s Grave.

In San Francisco’s seamy Tenderloin district, a teenage street hustler has been murdered in a shelter for boys. And the dedicated priest who runs the struggling home stands accused. But despite damning evidence that he’s a killer—and worse—Father Thomas Martin stands by his innocence. And attorney Peter Donley stands with him.

For three years Donley has cut his legal teeth in his uncle’s tiny, no-frills firm, where people come before profits. Just as Donley is poised to move on to a lucrative dream job, the shocking case lands in his lap, and he must put his future on hold while putting his courtroom skills to the test. But a ruthless DA seeking headlines and a brutal homicide cop bent on vengeance have their own agendas. Now, as he unearths the dirty secrets surrounding the case, Donley must risk his neck to save his client’s life…and expose the face of true evil.]]>
335 Robert Dugoni 1503994430 Kent 4 4.36 2016 The 7th Canon
author: Robert Dugoni
name: Kent
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2020/10/10
date added: 2020/10/10
shelves:
review:

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<![CDATA[Pattaya Pains: Essays, Observations, Stories & Real-Life Tales from Thailand & Its Fun City, Pattaya]]> 54820367 “Pattaya Pains� finds these matters and many others, like the death-rate on the roads, painful…to say the least.
As the nameless crone at the beginning of the book cackles, “Go on, luvvie, give yourself a treat. Learn why Thailand isn’t the Land of Smiles. Learn why Pattaya is Pain City not Fun City!”]]>
208 Jonathan Finch Kent 0 3.82 Pattaya Pains: Essays, Observations, Stories & Real-Life Tales from Thailand & Its Fun City, Pattaya
author: Jonathan Finch
name: Kent
average rating: 3.82
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2020/09/13
date added: 2020/09/13
shelves:
review:

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<![CDATA[If I had Wings These Windmills Would be Dead]]> 25250337 198 Chuck Howe Kent 3 3.00 2013 If I had Wings These Windmills Would be Dead
author: Chuck Howe
name: Kent
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2020/09/06
date added: 2020/09/07
shelves:
review:

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The Murmur of Bees 42306076 From a beguiling voice in Mexican fiction comes an astonishing novel—her first to be translated into English—about a mysterious child with the power to change a family’s history in a country on the verge of revolution.

From the day that old Nana Reja found a baby abandoned under a bridge, the life of a small Mexican town forever changed. Disfigured and covered in a blanket of bees, little Simonopio is for some locals the stuff of superstition, a child kissed by the devil. But he is welcomed by landowners Francisco and Beatriz Morales, who adopt him and care for him as if he were their own. As he grows up, Simonopio becomes a cause for wonder to the Morales family, because when the uncannily gifted child closes his eyes, he can see what no one else can—visions of all that’s yet to come, both beautiful and dangerous. Followed by his protective swarm of bees and living to deliver his adoptive family from threats—both human and those of nature—Simonopio’s purpose in Linares will, in time, be divined.

Set against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution and the devastating influenza of 1918, The Murmur of Bees captures both the fate of a country in flux and the destiny of one family that has put their love, faith, and future in the unbelievable.]]>
471 Sofía Segovia 1542090490 Kent 5 Excellent fiction

An enlightened story with broad historic significance. A good read that reaches into another dimension to tell a story of life, tradition, and work.]]>
4.20 2015 The Murmur of Bees
author: Sofía Segovia
name: Kent
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2020/06/14
date added: 2020/06/14
shelves:
review:
Excellent fiction

An enlightened story with broad historic significance. A good read that reaches into another dimension to tell a story of life, tradition, and work.
]]>
<![CDATA[The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell]]> 36183538
Sam believed it was God who sent Ernie Cantwell, the only African American kid in his class, to be the friend he so desperately needed. And that it was God’s idea for Mickie Kennedy to storm into Our Lady of Mercy like a tornado, uprooting every rule Sam had been taught about boys and girls.

Forty years later, Sam, a small-town eye doctor, is no longer certain anything was by design—especially not the tragedy that caused him to turn his back on his friends, his hometown, and the life he’d always known. Running from the pain, eyes closed, served little purpose. Now, as he looks back on his life, Sam embarks on a journey that will take him halfway around the world. This time, his eyes are wide open—bringing into clear view what changed him, defined him, and made him so afraid, until he can finally see what truly matters.

Winner of Suspense Magazine’s Crimson Scribe Award.]]>
449 Robert Dugoni 1503933334 Kent 4 4.52 2018 The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell
author: Robert Dugoni
name: Kent
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2018/10/30
date added: 2019/09/02
shelves:
review:

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<![CDATA[The Trouble with Goats and Sheep]]> 40606286 The Trouble with Goats and Sheep is a quirky and utterly charming debut about a community in need of absolution and two girls learning what it means to belong.

England, 1976. Mrs. Creasy is missing and the Avenue is alive with whispers. The neighbors blame her sudden disappearance on the heat wave, but ten-year-olds Grace and Tilly aren’t convinced. As the summer shimmers endlessly on, the girls decide to take matters into their own hands. Inspired by the local vicar, they go looking for God—they believe that if they find Him they might also find Mrs. Creasy and bring her home.

Spunky, spirited Grace and quiet, thoughtful Tilly go door to door in search of clues. The cul-de-sac starts to give up its secrets, and the amateur detectives uncover much more than ever imagined. As they try to make sense of what they’ve seen and heard, a complicated history of deception begins to emerge. Everyone on the Avenue has something to hide, a reason for not fitting in.

In the suffocating heat of the summer, the ability to guard these differences becomes impossible. Along with the parched lawns and the melting pavement, the lives of all the neighbors begin to unravel. What the girls don’t realize is that the lies told to conceal what happened one fateful day about a decade ago are the same ones Mrs. Creasy was beginning to peel back just before she disappeared.]]>
369 Joanna Cannon 150112191X Kent 4 3.60 2016 The Trouble with Goats and Sheep
author: Joanna Cannon
name: Kent
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2018/10/13
date added: 2019/09/02
shelves:
review:

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Hyperbole and a Half 17906245
Touching, absurd, and darkly comic, Allie Brosh’s highly anticipated book Hyperbole and a Half showcases her unique voice, leaping wit, and her ability to capture complex emotions with deceptively simple illustrations.

This full-color, beautifully illustrated edition features more than fifty percent new content, with ten never-before-seen essays and one wholly revised and expanded piece as well as classics from the website like, “The God of Cake,� “Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving,� and her astonishing, “Adventures in Depression,� and “Depression Part Two,� which have been hailed as some of the most insightful meditations on the disease ever written.

Brosh’s debut marks the launch of a major new American humorist who will surely make even the biggest scrooge or snob laugh. We dare you not to.]]>
385 Allie Brosh Kent 4 4.21 2013 Hyperbole and a Half
author: Allie Brosh
name: Kent
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2018/05/01
date added: 2019/09/02
shelves:
review:

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<![CDATA[I'll Go Home Then, It's Warm and Has Chairs. The Unpublished Emails.]]> 15780502 222 David Thorne Kent 4 4.13 2012 I'll Go Home Then, It's Warm and Has Chairs. The Unpublished Emails.
author: David Thorne
name: Kent
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2018/11/16
date added: 2019/09/02
shelves:
review:

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<![CDATA[A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, #5)]]> 18626828 Alternate cover edition of ASIN B003YL4LYI

In the aftermath of a colossal battle, Daenerys Targaryen rules with her three dragons as queen of a city built on dust and death. But Daenerys has thousands of enemies, and many have set out to find her. Fleeing from Westeros with a price on his head, Tyrion Lannister, too, is making his way east—with new allies who may not be the ragtag band they seem. And in the frozen north, Jon Snow confronts creatures from beyond the Wall of ice and stone, and powerful foes from within the Night’s Watch. In a time of rising restlessness, the tides of destiny and politics lead a grand cast of outlaws and priests, soldiers and skinchangers, nobles and slaves, to the greatest dance of all.]]>
1154 George R.R. Martin Kent 4 4.47 2011 A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, #5)
author: George R.R. Martin
name: Kent
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2019/08/27
date added: 2019/09/02
shelves:
review:

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