I was afraid this book might be a little “sappy” for me. I like emotional reads but rarely read the kind of books described as “heartwarming”, and this book about a friendship between a dying teenager and an elderly woman fit that bill. But it came highly recommended by Modern Mrs. Darcy’s Best Books of Summer 2022,…
This is a humorous and emotional saga of a Vietnamese family in America. Though not a perfect book for me, I expect this book will resonate quite a bit with those who are mothers and who are Vietnamese-American. Generations ago, the family is cursed because a woman runs off with a man who isn’t her…
This week’s Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, is about books I love that were written over 10 years ago. I decided to narrow my list to the ten year span between 2002 and 2012. For more favorite books, you can see this list of favorite books written before I was born,…
This book combined a lot of things I love about Jasmine Guillory, and a few things I didn’t love so much. Isabelle is a likeable character, sympathetic and fairly well-developed. She works as an assistant in a publishing house, and I found the description of the work fascinating. Izzy actually gets to coach, prod, and…
Stuart has written a second pull-your-heart-out-and-stomp-all-over-it book, one that did not disappoint for a minute, even considering how much I loved Shuggie Bain. Stuart manages to write about very ugly things so beautifully. These two books are similar in a lot of ways, so if I can criticize anything it’s that Stuart isn’t breaking new…
I loved Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, although now, nearly 12 years later, I didn’t remember much about the book. Maybe I should have reread it before reading the sequel, The Candy House, but instead I read it much like a stand-alone book. Maybe that’s why I had trouble connecting with it. Both…
Reading The Suite Spot reminded me how much I like stories about small towns. I’ve never lived in one myself, and I’ve always imagined I’d find them claustrophobic (I prefer anonymity and being left to myself). But for whatever reason, I love stories about people who move to very small towns and find a community there.…
I liked this novel, but I didn’t love it. Rachel is a manager at a large luxury hotel in Fort Lauderdale, when she loses her job after she’s sexually assaulted by a wealthy patron. When she can’t find a decent job in Florida, she moves to Kelley Island in Ohio for a job working for…
When asked if I’d be interested in reviewing this book, I was excited by the idea of a novel set in early 90s Seattle music scene. I was in college at that time and it may be cliché but the Seattle sound really did rock my world. There was something so personal and emotional about the…
Before the Ever After is a beautifully written middle-grade novel about a 12-year-old boy whose father, a professional football player, is suffering from CTE. The book occurs in a time before anything was widely known about CTE and its effects on many athletes. Zachariah, or ZJ, is in the dark about what’s happening to his father, and…
I picked up this book on NetGalley as a way to lighten my reading and find some new romance authors. I didn’t know anything about the book or the author, but I was intrigued by the title. The idea of a “good girl complex” seemed like something I could understand, and I’m drawn to stories…
This is a book I’ve been recommending lately, and it’s one you may not have heard of (I discovered it through Modern Mrs. Darcy’s summer reading list. This debut novel is a story about a dysfunctional family in small town Texas, and it’s based on the stories and themes of classical mythology. I thought it was fantastic.…
The Book Stop 