We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
Last year, I tried to complete the seasonal reading challenges on Goodreads (though the skeptic in me feels like it’s a way for Amazon to get people to buy more books). This year, I have been checking the categories and using them as a way to work through books I already own but I won’t buy a book to complete the challenge and it’s also fine if I don’t get all the achievements. I am currently in too many book clubs to also let challenges […]
All of Us Murderers by KJ Charles
This is another first for me! Even though I know KJ Charles is a popular author here, I never got around to reading her till now. It probably doesn’t help that for a long time I didn’t realize KJ Charles and Cat Sebastian were two different authors and kept conflating the two. I liked a lot about this one. I quite enjoyed the gothic mansion, toxic family dynamics and trapped in the house set up. I also appreciated how she set up the narrator and […]
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
4.5 stars CBR17 Bingo: Black (a book with a black cover) I had completely forgotten that I read and reviewed this book back in 2016. My original review can be found here. My plot summary of the more than 200-year-old novel can be found in my previous review. Nevertheless, my reading experience this time around was different enough from earlier times that I wanted to write about some of my thoughts and observations, not to mention some of the points of discussion that came up during my […]
Play Nice by Rachel Harrison
Fiend by Alma Katsu
I read two books last week, both horror, both the kind of horror that used its tropes to tell a larger tale… Play Nice**** I’ve confessed my love for Rachel Harrison’s work many times in this space. If you don’t count Stephen King — who I don’t exclusively read for horror — Harrison is my favorite horror writer. I love her textured takes on womanhood and the decisions women have to make at critical moments of their lives. I’m glad I was cued into her […]
The Bourbon Thief by Tiffany Reisz
This book feels like a throw back – the characters, the melodrama and everything of the main story honestly felt like they were from a novel written in the 90s, back when Danielle Steele reigned. After Cooper McQueen discovers that the woman he brought home last night is about to walk out with a million dollar bottle of bourbon, she offers him a trade – she will tell him a story and then, she will leave with the bottle. Being bored and rich, he decides […]
Banyan Moon by Thao Thai
This is the story of three generations of Vietnamese-American mothers. The first, Minh, was a canny businesswoman who escaped from Vietnam shortly after the fall of Saigon, with her devoted husband, daughter, and son, and a significant amount of gold sewn into her children’s clothing. (She had owned a very lucrative jewelry business – good choice.) Upon making their way to Florida, they purchased Banyan House, a Gothic manor house complete with the aforementioned massive tree out front. It was here her daughter, Huong, grew […]
