"Blood is the first thing I see, covering the front of his white V-neck tee and down across his yellow swim trunks." As we open the book, we meet Vickie, enjoying the quiet of her family home in rural Tennessee. Quiet and peaceful until she hears her twin brother, Travis, screaming for help and emerging [...]
"The soul of the fairy is its evanescence. Its charm is the eternal doubt, rose-tinted with the shadow of a hope. But the thrill is all in ourselves." The Cottingley Secret is part historical novel, part contemporary novel, where the two stories intersect and meet together in the end. In 1917, two girls brought together [...]
"A rumor was afloat in sixth grade, and everyone was dying to know if it was true." Colorblind is a story about integration in Montgomery, Alabama in 1968. The rumor is about the first African-American teacher coming to Wyatt Elementary School as part of mandatory desegregation. In the deep South, this mandate obviously is met with [...]
"That's what Americans are supposed to do. There's no excuse for hanging on to negative emotions in this country." The Bad Dream Notebook is a novel about grief, loss, addiction and recovery. Erica Mason just lost her husband. Her daughter Mona just lost her dad. Chronic back pain turned out to be terminal cancer. The [...]
"The interview room is small and square." We begin The Party with the definitions of the word. A social gathering. A political group. A guilty person. The wording of the title and placing these definitions in the beginning deliciously brilliant, as we know going in that this novel will be an experience on a multidimensional [...]
"Anything is possible," I said. "But most things are unlikely." The Heart's Invisible Furies is an epic, all-encompassing story spanning the life of Cyril Avery. Cyril is adopted, "not a real Avery", as his adopted parent's Charles and Maude often remind him, growing up in the 1950's in Ireland. Even though his adoptive parent's remind [...]
"The forest had claws and teeth." The opening words to Final Girls and we are thrown into the beginning of a horror story. A girl, screaming, running through a forest covered in blood, trying to escape death that follows her. This is how we meet Quincy Carpenter. We are thrown abruptly from the past and [...]
"In the midst of a feminist revolution, Karla is an island of uncertainty." Among The Survivors is a beautiful journey into self-discovery. Karla Most has been raised by her very paranoid, possibly delusional but very single mother. She has been dressed in black since she was a baby, (even her diapers according to motherly lore), [...]
"We can't help the way we're born. We can't help what we are, only what life we choose to make for ourselves." Excuse me while I fangirl over here! Okay, in all seriousness. I was very nervous to read Warbringer. Don't get me wrong, I was beyond excited that Leigh Bardugo was writing this adaptation. [...]
"She was radiant with life even when she was alone, or thought she was." Heather, The Totality is a power punch of a novel. Short but brutally precise, each word is chosen carefully and delivers deliberate intensity. We are introduced to Mark and Karen Breakstone, a couple living in New York. Having married later in [...]
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