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I just adore the odd, dysfunctional Bernadette Fox.
From her people-aversion to the bizarre truths she has formed her world around, I find her to be both indestructible + muddled, brilliant + thick, exasperating + lovable.
I felt sections of this book could've been axed or shaken to keep the story seamless. The constant character switchback allows Semple a five-dimensional tale in chronological order. However, it snags, not allowing you to sit with a character before you're whisked away to a “This Just In” segment of another character's development.
Semple excels in laying out the subtitles of a character's thought stream, assessments so relatable and offensive, only an author courageous and witty would lay out a persona so raw, so refreshing.
As a Criminal Minds devotee and writer, I'm jealous I didn't write this book first. In his usual talent and flair, Ronsen inserts himself among the experts, those studying psychopaths and those labeled such.
Something was missing from this book that I can't quite put my finger on. I wish more science had been included to round out the interviews.
Overall: 3.5 stars
While reading The Reminders, I can't count the number of times I muttered to myself, “Kids are so stupid adorable.” This book balanced the lightness of childhood and weight of adulthood on one plate. As a musician and writer myself, I connected with how Joan Lennon sees, feels and interacts with the world.
Read: If the scribbled drawings of kids make you giggle
Skip: If you can't stand The Beatles
👍🏽Pick it: if you love music, dig the 70's and unresolved heartache.
👎🏽Skip it: if you're looking for the book version of A Star is Born.
SEXY. I struggle to find a better umbrella descriptor of Daisy & The Six, This book impressed me on so many levels that I'm going to bullet point the goodies:
* As a musician, this book captured the intimacy that hums down to your toes when you're on stage, behind your instrument, singing into someone else's harmony.
* Camilla & Billy. Daisy & Billy. Karen & Warren. The relationships – the breaking, making and ambiguity – jolted me.
* And can we talk about girl power? If you read Jenkins' Seven Husbands, this trope wont surprise you. The females in Daisy & The Six covered the spectrum of feminism, each wrestling with unique, but relatable head v. heart turmoils.
* Jenkins is untouchable in the art of dialogue.
* Additionally, seeing that this book is a fictional creation, the inclusion of the completed song lyrics are the understated, but most-stunning proof of Jenkins' talent.
Memoirs are in and of themselves vulnerability vehicles. What Owusu has delivered here raises the bar of self-revealing to capture a deeper and viscerally-stunning account of coping with one's own history.
For some, this book will feel too weighty and too angsty. I found Aftershocks to be the kind of appropriate, earth-shattering prose that is earned by Owusu and few others, brave enough to explore their identity, even if it means upending truth as they've known it.
I found this to be eerily and uniquely told. I enjoyed the author taking the road less traveled, giving peaks into the minds of all the characters involved, rather than a straight telling from The Nanny, or the mother or the children. It added a layer of eeriness that built.
However, for all the intentional steps taken to build the plot, I felt the ending was rushed and jarringly dull.
I adored elements of this book.
The style✅
The themes✅
The character development✅
However, I was not expecting the book to be so graphic. I don't consider myself to be a sensitive, straight-laced reader. But I skipped pages, finding the love-making details did not add, but distract from the story's core.
4.5
The sheer manpower demanded to gather and compile the material for this book had me frequently pausing to appreciate Brown's full-throttle commitment to writing a panoramic portrait of Princess Margaret.
Brown goes a step further and crafts each chapter to be uniquely structured. 99 glimpses sets this book up to be thick, but fascinating to the last page.
This book surprised me. I typically divide authors of thriller and literature into two separate camps. Frear is one of those genre-busters, with her quick wit equalling her talent to craft suspense.
Sweet Little Lies keeps 👏🏽the 👏🏽twists 👏🏽coming.👏🏽
The synopsis for this book had me immediately. The pervasive fascination with true crime has dulled our culture's ability to examine and alter some disturbing mindsets we've mindlessly adopted. This book had that opportunity.
The first few chapters were intriguing investigations. Then, the focus collapsed into a memoir about a young woman's transition to Los Angeles. It was a confusing pivot and I waited in vain for Bolin to return to the Dead Girls matter at hand, on book jacket.
She is a talented writer. Unquestionably. But this collection of essays would have been stronger as two separate books.
I'll admit it. Homeless-to-Harvard stories aren't my schtick. There's too much cinematic drama, expected slip-ups that ultimately make for an eye-roll and less-than-engaging story, no matter how truly extraordinary and true it is.
Enter: Educated. What a force, this book. Westover's frank recollection makes a reader feel he or she is in the room - you feel her pull to something outside the world she knows, you see the impossibility that surrounds her every basic desire.
Queen of the Spoiler Alert, I, of course, knew Tara Westover was going to be just fine. Better than fine, in fact. Which is what separates Westover's skill as an author and storyteller that much more stirring. Educated has become one of those required-reading recommendations for me.
Unless asked, I tend to keep my reading raves and rants to myself. But once I finished this, I couldn't stop myself from being its missionary to spread its good word. I recited passages to my parent, screen shotted pages to friends. Everyone has something to gain from this wisdom-drenched collection of essays.
Kelly Corrigan captures the most heart-wrenching of human experiences and somehow makes them palpable.
I cannot overstate how much I loved this book.
Adeyemi, you have created an untouchable stunner.
This book is one of the most unique stories I've had the delight to read and the author masters a four-POV narration in a world like no other.
Top five reads of my year.
All👏🏽the👏🏽stars!
As the older sister of a sibling with a mental illness, I resonated so deeply with the characters within this novel.
The author beautifully relayed the chaos and its effects from all angles and I can't tell you how much I appreciate her exploring those corners.
Think: Big Little Lies meets Gone Girl
I DID NOT SEE THAT COMING.
This book threw me across the room with the revelation of Daphne's scheme. The author does an excellent job of teasing, not telling and saving the twist, when a reader was deep and certain how this story would end.
Most importantly, I closed the book convicted to be more in tune to women in Daphne's position and never assume the character of a person because of the facade displayed.
HUGE Victoria Schwab fan, but this is my least-favorite story of hers. And even still, she is such an exquisite writer, her least-compelling is still miles above “Good.”
Schwab is a master at creating a fantasy world, but this book felt rushed, character development on double speed, the world sketched out but not colored.
And still I'll probably read the second book in the series.
Think: Back To The Futuresque
I had a hard time with this one. It felt drawn out and I honestly found the literal American Dream a little too eccentric. Points won for creativity, points lost for action scenes written to give whiplashes.
I'm of a generation that is the product of unedited violence, true crime television, overdramatized news broadcasts teaching me about the horrors outside my own home + inside my own head.
For all the engrained desensitization, I still found myself having to close this book, walk outside, hug a stranger - grab onto something light, something good.
Exquisite writing.
This book will break your heart.
You must prepare to be collapsed by the realities of injustice.
But you just must power through to experience the unconditional love on profound display.
4.5 (Goodreads, create a half scale, because 4 just won't do!)
Honest + Vulnerable Feminism is told right and proud. Zeplin's brilliant wit in her writing a multi-voice view of Avivagate fortified + humbled me as a reader and a woman. This book is important.
READ :: If you want the woman in you or women around you to learn of genuine strength and softness of feminism.
SKIP :: If you + your ignorance are content and cozy in your misogynistic cave.
In the wake of 9/11, distrust became a comfortable backdrop to the upbrings of we, the millennials and successive generations. Big Brother and Big Data, ubiquitous surveillance, foreign intelligence and invasion — the breadth of exposure fears is an ever-expanding chasm in the Information Age. In Quotients, O'Neill takes this modern-primal panic of being seen and flips it inward — how far will we go to protect being known fully?
At the center of this narrative is Jeremy, a former intelligence operative, and Alexandra, an image fixer for nations. Their marriage is the chess board O'Neill plays out the relatable relationship fears — Is she cheating on me? — layering it with murkier and weightier questions of assurance — Do my secrets make me unlovable? We see Jeremy and Alexandra flailing in the mental deep ends of their individual pools, an infuriating contrast to the shallow end they often choose to splash around with one another.
The blunt dialogue between the couple is entirely Gilmore Girl -esque, in that, its reflexive wit is quick and smart, almost too quick and smart to be believable exchanges, but instruments each use to forge and ward off intimacy. Ripples of distrust permeate their parenting and surrounding rings, Jeremy's ex-partner, Alexandra's schizophrenic brother and the journalist desperately and feverishly attempting to make sense of it all.
“Pregnant women yelling at their already born.”
No page is without guttural examples of O'Neill's rhetoric. She insists on extrapolating the casual, carefully taking it apart to repackage simple observations into beautifully-complicated narratives. Taken as a one-liner, the effect is stunning. Spanning the course of an entire book? Exhausting. Because by Quotient 's end, the story is less resolved as it is wrapped up in an exquisite linguistic bow.
That O'Neill wasn't out to write just another literary thriller is stunningly clear. However, Quotients is everything but.
In order to keep pace with its plot and characters (plus their code names and those code names' aliases), a reader must assume the lunacy illustrated. O'Neill created a meaty meditation for the current age, art made of our paranoia.
This was a book I wasn't expecting to love. The premise wasn't grabbing, too quirky to be set in this world, too realistic to take place in a fantasy one.
But Lang made it work beautifully. The plot spans Weylyn's lifetime, introducing and carrying several characters through the story. I have to applaud the author's ability to give each minor character body and emotional complexion.
By the end, I was rooting for the world where animal-telepathic Weylyn and magic-pig Merlin exist.
Ooo I started 2018 on a HIGH note and swallowed this book whole.
Its message is so applicable and timely, I would urge everyone take it up, but specifically my generation and those younger.
We are living in a world that will does not forget and has reintroduced a new wave of public shaming as the just punishment for wrongdoings, accidental or intentionally alike. Ronsen does an incredible job giving readers the full picture without stamping his morality over the story.
This book was important and convicting and has me thinking still.
While beautifully written, some writers just want to say more, even at the expense of their audience. With Wild Beauty, the story became exhaustive, pages spent reiterating the same point(poignantly, I should add). Imaginative story to illustrate that, yes indeed, Love grows such strange things.
Marion reminded me of a duller, more cunning version of Bernadette (Where'd You Go,Bernadette?). I found myself dotingly despising all the characters in this book, and for that, I found it refreshing. Culliton makes no drawn-out attempts to convince readers how to feel about her characters. She describes their actions and feelings as their truth and gives the reader authority to form an opinion. Again, refreshing.
The Misfortune paints a bleak, but real picture of how our individual nurturing (financial and emotional) surface and subconsciously unravel us.