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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Unrated | 384 pages | Simon Pulse | Contemporary | Release Date: 2/18/2020
Of Curses and Kisses is an introspective slow cooker ( I saw this term on Twitter and I couldn’t wait to use it !) of a romance about Jaya, a reserved modern-day princess at St. Rosetta’s International Academy. She’s on a mission to take down a rival family’s heir, Grey Emmerson, for a slight against her sister. It’s a lofty goal, but Jaya discovers instead of being a fierce rival, Grey Emerson is a broody, introverted outcast.
We follow Jaya as she is entrenched in Rosemont drama, this book is genre-savvy and Emerson sees through Jaya’s start-a-fake-relationship-and-dump-him plan so the initial premise of the book is dropped pretty quickly. The book is a lot of Jaya and Emerson working through their emotions and coming to terms with who they want to be versus who their families expect them to be.
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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Rating: Unrated | 320 pages | Blink YA | Contemporary | Release Date: 03/03/20
Mayra Cuevas debut is a coming of age novel for fans of decadent food and charming European cities. Seventeen-year-old Isa has a passion for French cooking, which has kept her afloat now that she has left Chicago for the scenic coastal city of Nantes, France with her father and his new wife–the woman he cheated on her mom with.
The situation is a little awkward but it’s all worth it when Isa is accepted into a cutthroat culinary program where failure is not an option. She is determined to keep her focus– even if her family’s new charming young house guest proves to be a bit of a distraction.
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