We're an Open Book
15 Hours 54 Minutes | Hachette Audio | YA Fantasy | 10/02/2018
Laini Taylor is one of those authors who reminds me why I love books and reading. She weaves these sweepingly romantic epic fantasies that I can’t imagine working in any other medium. I have officially reached book hangover territory.
…7 hours 50 min. | Penguin Audio | Mystery| Release Date: 7/30/2019
An idyllic upstate New York neighborhood is shaken when a flirtatious young wife is found brutally murdered in the trunk of her car. Her shady husband is the number one subject but in this neighborhood, everyone has a secret worth killing for
And by secret I mean cheating. Like, there is a lot of mentions of cheating in this book.
This my first foray into domestic mystery/thriller after Big Little Lies--which was one of my favorite reading experiences–and this one just didn’t work for me. I didn’t get the racing to the end feeling I wanted and it may have had something to do with the fact that I figured out the killer at 60%.
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4 hours 55 minutes| Simon & Schuster Audio | Nonfiction | Release Date: 4/14/2020
Science reporter Lulu Miller is maybe best known as the co-founder of the Invisibilia podcast. I remember when she left the show to write a book and when I saw her book on Scribd I decided to check it out.
This book is a mix of memoir, nature writing and biography as Miller dives into the life of 19th-century ichthyologist David Starr Jordan and his obsessive quest to categorize every existing fish. Miller became fascinated with Jordan during a bleak period in her own life and seeks to learn what drove Jordan to create order out of chaos when everything was falling apart around him.
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399 Pages | Knopf | AU Historical Fiction | Release Date: 06/02/2020
The Court of Miracles is a Les Miserables retelling that re-imagines discarded daughter Eponine “Nina” Thenadier as a thief in the underground Parisian criminal network known as The Miracle Court. When a powerful member of the Miracle Court threatens to enslave Nina’s sister Ettie (aka Cosette) she makes moves to bring him down. All while the June Revolution is stirring.
Am I the only one who thought this was a fantasy ? Because it isn’t and I’m trying not to let my review be clouded by what I expected to be.
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5 hours 9 min. | Harper Audio | Non-Fiction | Release Date: 7/28/2020
I’ve finally been in the mood for nonfiction again and picked this one up while browsing the new release shelf with no context whatsoever. I skim read it was about a murder and thought it was maybe true crime (it’s not). I didn’t even look at the cover long enough to realize Tretheway is a Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate.
Memorial Drive is a literary eulogy to Tretheway’s mother, who was shot and killed by her abusive ex-husband in 1985 while Tretheway was away at college. The book begins with Tretheway’s experiences growing up as a biracial girl in 1960s South and she takes us along through triumphs and heartbreaks as she and her mother make their way to Atlanta for a new life together.
Tretheway has a Pulitzer Prize in poetry so it’s no surprise that the writing is amazing. There is a large section where the narrative voice switches to the second person and it is done flawlessly. I was listening to this on audio and it took me a minute to even realized she’d switched.
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Audiobook length: 7 hours 50 min. | Publisher: Harper Audio | Genre: YA Contemporary| Release Date: 2/11/20
Jess gave a glowing review to Fred Aceves debut, The Closest I’ve Come, making me particularly eager to pick up his sophomore novel.
After a video of 17-year-old David Espinoza getting slapped unconscious goes viral, David is too embarrassed to ever show his face around town. He’s tired of being bullied for how thin he is and spends the summer of his senior year working out to attain a physique like his favorite action movie stars. He joins a bodybuilding gym where he is slowly pulled into the insanely toxic community of professional bodybuilding and steroids.
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