My Reading Diary (with spoilers)

(Spoilers Ahead) I grabbed What Have You Done as a Kindle First read awhile back.  I finally got around to reading it and I was so glad I did!  This book sucked me in right from the beginning.  It opens with the story of a young Liam being tied up and almost drowned in a bathtub by his mentally disturbed mother as she was trying to get them all back together with his father (who you learn is deceased).   Then suddenly Liam awakes from the dream, naked in a bathtub filled with water (something he is terrified of) and with no memory of what happened to the night before.  Boom! Sucked in! Present day, Liam is a forensic investigator for a police department and his brother Sean being a cop in the same department.  Both survived their mother's attack and have grown up to be responsible adults... maybe. Liam is called to the scene of a homicide after his disturbing morning and he arrives to find the woman he had a long affair with until very recentl...

(Spoilers Ahead) I have had After the Rain on my Kindle for probably a year now.  I am a big fan of Renee Carlino's and I grabbed this one while it was on sale awhile ago and just never got around to reading until last week.  Renee is a great teller of love stories and this book was no different.  This is the story of Avelina ("Ava") and Nate.  You meet Ava in the beginning as a young girl who grew up with a fairly idealistic life until her father passes away when she is a teenager.  After that, her mom falls into a very deep depression and Ava is basically raising herself. Ava aspires to be a nurse but has a love of horses and is traveling around with her mother and winning barrel races on her prized horse.  On one of these trips Ava meets Jake, another rodeo guy, and falls in love. She drops out of high school and marries him three months later.  Ava's mom moves to Spain to live with family and her older brother is an attorney in New York. Ava...

(Spoilers Ahead) I have read a few of Susan Meissner's books and I have had the opportunity to meet her a couple of times discussing some of her other books.  I have had A Bridge Across the Ocean on my Kindle for a while and since I have plans to stay on the Queen Mary for an all day book event and overnight stay in just a couple of weeks, I thought it was the perfect time to read this one. I actually ended up listening to this one on audio, which had some challenges.  The reader was great, able to inflect accents of French and German quite seamlessly.  But there were definitely parts where I paused and thought "what did she just say?" You have three timelines happening throughout the book: (1) Present day, Brette, who has the gift of "sight" and the ability to see "drifters" (ghosts/spirits) although she has spent most of her life trying to ignore that gift. (2) 1946 post-WWII Germany, Annaliese, a German Ballerina who ends up married to a Na...

(Spoilers Ahead) I received a copy of Girls Like Us from my Girly Book Club's Book Trib giveaway.  It was my first book by this author and I enjoyed it.  It was set on Long Island.  The main character, Nell, is an FBI agent with the Behaviorial Analysis Unit (BAU) who is home in Long Island following the death of her father.  Her father was a homicide detective with the Suffolk County Sheriff's Office.  He had spent all of Nell's life on the force and as a result, she was really part of the "family" of cops.  Her father died in a motorcycle accident that was presumed to be the result of a mix of drinking too much and wet roads.  While Nell is in town, one of the local cops (Lee) asks Nell to consult on a homicide case that just occurred. It appears that this may be a serial killer as the way the girls were killed and their bodies disposed of was very similar.  As she starts to investigate she uncovers some inconsistencies that lead her to s...

(Spoilers Ahead) I had the chance to reconnect with a favorite author of mine at a recent book club.  I love asking authors I enjoy what they are currently recommending as one of their favorite recent reads.  This author said, "The Light We Lost - I must be reading it for the fifth or sixth time."  Well, that is telling in and of itself.  So I put it on my to-read list and requested it from my local library. I picked it up last weekend and after finishing another love story, I wasn't sure I was ready to pick this one up right away, but I did anyway.  I was immediately pulled in to the writing. This was a love story for the ages.  Lucy and Gabe meet on September 11, 2001 in New York.  The day of their first meeting I think was a driver for their very intense love story.  The book is written as letters or a novel from Lucy to Gabe.  If you have ever had an intense, all consuming love... the one for which you compare all things love ...

(Spoilers Ahead) I picked up  The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek  from a fellow book club friend after seeing her and several other people post about how much the enjoyed it.  I thoroughly enjoyed the story and learning about two things I never new existed: The Pack Horse Library Project and the blue-skinned people of Kentucky .  This story takes place in the backwoods of Kentucky in hill country in the 1930's.  The book opens with a librarian on her mule coming upon a body hanging from a tree with a noticeably blue-skinned foot and a crying baby on the ground.  You enter the story not knowing who it is that is hanging and who it was that found the body.  The main character goes by many names: her given name of Cussy Mary, the book woman and Bluet.  The last one comes from the color of her skin.  I have to admit I stopped pretty early on to google the blue-skinned people of Kentucky because I wanted to see pictures. I will let you ...

(Spoilers Ahead) I grabbed Forever is the Worst Long Time from my local library after reading another book by this same author ( I'm Fine and Neither Are You ).  I enjoyed her storytelling so much and this book had great reviews and was available at the library so I dove right in. Let me start by saying, this book was beautifully written. This was one of those books that I wished I had on my kindle or that I owned myself so I could highlight and underline the passages that just took my breath away.  In situations like this, I have to resort to modern technology.  That is, taking a picture of a page with one of my fingers pointing to the line of text I want to remember.  My phone gathers a lot of these pictures as an avid library book reader. This is one of those books I will definitely recommend to people.  It is a love story that calls you on your own bullshit about the excuses you make in life - especially relating to your own love story. (Come to thin...

(Spoilers Ahead) I read  The Huntress by Kate Quinn last December as book club read.  This was my first Kate Quinn novel.  I had heard great things about The Alice Network and after reading this book, I made sure to "steal" The Alice Network at my other book club's holiday white elephant gift exchange.  I haven't read that one yet because I am waiting to discuss The Huntress at book club next week first so that I don't mix the two up. I finished this book one month, and 21 books ago.  I have a feeling this "summary" is going to be fairly vague based on my horrible ability to recall the details of the books I read.  But, let's give this a shot! The thing about this book I really liked is how the story line jumped in time and in narrator.  So part of the time you were getting the story of "present day" (post WWII) told by 17 year old Jordan who is the only child of her widowed father, an antique restorer.  Other times you were hearin...

(Spoilers Ahead) Intensity by Dean Koontz was originally published on Halloween in the year 2000.  I have been a Koontz fan for years and I have been reading horror books for years.  Somehow, I completely missed this book.  It showed up last October in one of those "best horror" book lists that are so popular that time of year.  I added it to my to-read list then and just got around to reading it. I actually jumped between listening to the audio book and reading the physical book.  I probably listened to about 80% but when it came down to the last 50 pages or so, I had to pick up the book because the audio was just not going to be fast enough to get through the tension. The story lives up to its name - it is so INTENSE.  The book opens with us meeting the main character Chyna Shepard.  She is on her way to spend the weekend at a friend's parents house.  We learn early in that Chyna had a very dysfunctional childhood with a mother who put h...

(Spoilers Ahead) I think I originally picked up the book I'm Fine and Neither Are You as a Kindle First book (that free book selection Amazon Prime members get every month).  The cover caught my eye and the premise seemed like it would be an interesting and maybe even "fun" read.  Boy was "fun" not the word to describe this one. The book opens with Penny, who is married to Sanjay and  they have two kids. Penny works at a demanding job and has a husband who dropped out of medical school to pursue his passion for writing and three years later he is barely bringing in any money and Penny is having daily dreams of running away from her family.  Right from the get-go you get this overwhelming feeling that something bad is going to happen.  I almost think Penny's husband or kids will die.  (Of course I have forgotten that the book summary already alludes to the fact that Sanjay is alive at least for most of this novel.) Penny's best friend is Jenny. J...

(Spoilers Ahead) Before I start writing about this book, I have to just say something... This is probably the 5th or 6th book by Renee Carlino that I have read.  I was first introduced to her by a close friend and just fell in love with the story of that first book (Before We Were Strangers).  I have loved every book sense.  Last year, I had the chance to meet Renee in person when she visited our book club to discuss Swear on this Life (yep, loved it!).  As for Renee as a real-live person, oh I just adored her.  She was such fun.  We chatted like we had been friends for years.  So when I saw this new book, The Last Post , was coming out - I bought it right away.  Then I found out she was coming back to our book club again this year and I was so excited!  And then I read this book and I was like... well, crap.  I didn't love this one nearly as much.  But how am I going to tell Renee that? I'm not, haha.  But I am going to wr...

(Spoilers Ahead) I read this book on my Kindle as an e-book rental from my local library (I love the library!).  Children of Blood and Bone  by Tomi Adeyemi has been on and off my to-read shelf a couple of times. I originally found it on some list of recommended books and it sounded fun and interesting. Then later I decided I didn't want to read these sort of "fantasy" books so I took it off the shelf. Then I saw the author released a 2nd book and looked to be turning this in to a continuing series, so I reconsidered it.  Then recently I read another book that is classified as fantasy ( Ninth House ) and I enjoyed it so much that I added this book back to my to-read shelf and requested it from the library. The story takes place in a fantasy world called Orisha where there is a society of non-magical people ( they were called something that I can't now remember... hence the reason for this diary... )   and magical people who have had their magic taken away by ...

(No Spoilers Ahead) What does it say about me that the first book I finish in a new year (a new decade!) is a satire?  I hope it means that I will continue to find the humor in life.  A Woman First: First Woman   is authored by Selina Meyer.  What else has she written, you ask? Nothing.  Because she is a television character. Before you go pick this up because you think it is some female empowerment book written by some up and coming new power figure in the always ongoing women's lib movement - you should know that Selina Meyer is the fictional character played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus (yes, that is why that person on the cover looks familiar) on an HBO show called VEEP.  The show ran for seven seasons ending in 2019 and it's hilarious.  Go watch it. But - and this is a big but - if you have never watched the show, do not pick up this book!  You will find it ridiculous. You will wonder how it ever got published. It is wordy and rambling and ...

TLDR; Before going any further on this blog... If it's a book you already read, read the post about it. If it is a book you never plan to read, read the post about it.  If it is on your to-read list, don't read the post, just ask me what I thought about the book and I will give you a non-spoiler review :) I am always reading (I mean, ALWAYS).  I track the books I read on Goodreads religiously.  When I complete a book, I mark it as "read" and I give it a rating (1 to 5 stars) but I would say only maybe 30% of the time I actually write any sort of review.  When I do write a review, it's not one of those lengthy reviews rehashing the story but it is instead just a few sentences about the impression the book made on me.  That sort of review is helpful to me when I pull up a book on Goodreads to see how I liked the book, but honestly it doesn't do much more than that. Because I read so much, people often ask me for book recommendations or ask my opinion on a bo...