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Showing posts from December, 2016

ARC Review: Two Days Gone by Randall Silvis

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Release Date: January 10, 2017 Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark Format: Kindle Pages: 400 pages Genre: Mystery Buy: Paperback | Kindle  Synopsis:  The perfect family. The perfect house. The perfect life. All gone now. What could cause a man, when all the stars of fortune are shining upon him, to suddenly snap and destroy everything he has built? This is the question that haunts Sergeant Ryan DeMarco after the wife and children of beloved college professor and bestselling author Thomas Huston are found slaughtered in their home. Huston himself has disappeared and so is immediately cast as the prime suspect. DeMarco knows-or thinks he knows-that Huston couldn't have been capable of murdering his family. But if Huston is innocent, why is he on the run? And does the half-finished manuscript he left behind contain clues to the mystery of his family's killer? Review: This is a book that keeps you guessing, just when you think you have it figured out you find

Book Review: Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family & Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance

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Release Date: June 28, 2016 Publisher: Harper Format: Hardcover Pages: 272 pages Genre: memoir Buy: Hardcover | Kindle   Synopsis: The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of  Hillbilly Elegy  plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himsel

ARC Review: How Will I Know You by Jessica Treadway

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Release Date: December 6, 2016 Publisher: Grand Central Publishing Format: Kindle Pages: 416 Genre: Mystery / Crime Buy: Hardcover | Kindle Synopsis: On a cold December day in northern upstate New York, the body of high school senior Joy Enright is discovered in the woods at the edge of a pond. She had been presumed drowned, but an autopsy shows that she was, in fact, strangled. As the investigation unfolds, four characters tell the story from widely divergent perspectives: Susanne, Joy's mother and a professor at the local art college; Martin, a black graduate student suspected of the murder; Harper, Joy's best friend and a potential eyewitness; and Tom, a rescue diver and son-in-law of the town's police chief. As a web of small-town secrets comes to light, a dramatic conclusion reveals the truth about Joy's death. Review: This book is told from 4 different perspectives, and from a time before the murder and the time after the murder.  It was interest

Audio Book: Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

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Release Date: August 6, 2016 Publisher: Random House Audio Format: Audible Length: 10 hours 11 minutes Narrator:  Bahni Turpin Genre: Historical Fiction Buy: Audible | Kindle | Paperback  Synopsis: Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.  In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a hav

Audio Book: Winter (Lunar Chronicles) by Marissa Meyer

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Release Date: November 10, 2015 Publisher: MacMillan Audio Format: Audio Narrator: Rebecca Soler Length: 23 hours 30 minutes Genre: Fantasy Buy: Audible | Kindle | Paperback   Synopsis:  Winter despises her stepmother, and knows Levana won't approve of her feelings for her childhood friend--the handsome palace guard, Jacin. But Winter isn't as weak as Levana believes her to be and she's been undermining her stepmother's wishes for years. Together with the cyborg mechanic, Cinder, and her allies, Winter might even have the power to launch a revolution and win a war that's been raging for far too long. Can Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and Winter defeat Levana and find their happily ever afters? Review: This was an amazing ending to the Lunar Chronicles.  All of the story lines get wrapped up in a satisfactory way and yet the story kept you on the edge of your seat.  Meyer has an uncanny way of featuring the main character yet also giving all the ot

ARC Review: Cover Me In Darkness by Eileen Rendahl

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Release Date: December 8, 2016 Publisher: Midnight Ink Format: Kindle Pages: 288 pages Genre: Mystery Buy: Kindle | Paperback Synopsis:  Amanda Sinclair has to fight harder than most for everything she has after fleeing the cult that left her brother dead at her mother’s hand. Amanda works a quiet job in quality control for a small cosmetics company, trying to leave her past behind her—until she learns that her mother has committed suicide in the mental ward where she’s been locked away for the past ten years. At first, Amanda believes that her mother killed herself, but when she looks through the personal belongings left behind, it seems her death may be related to the upcoming parole hearing for cult leader Patrick Collier. Teaming up with her mother’s psychologist, Amanda starts to peel away the layers of secrets that she’s built between herself and her own past, and what she finds is a truth that’s almost too big to believe. Review: Amanda still struggles with