Dorrie is a young woman struggling to find the money to go to college. When she sees an advertisement to be a surrogate, she believes it's a sign that her destiny is to help a family have a baby and then realize her dreams. It's a perfect plan, but then she falls in love" Raised in a wealthy family with ties to the ruler of Galilee, she is rebellious and ambitious, with a brilliant mind and a daring spirit. She engages in furtive scholarly pursuits and writes narratives about neglected and silenced women.
Ana is expected to marry an older widower, a prospect that horrifies her. An encounter with eighteen-year-old Jesus changes everything. Their marriage evolves with love and conflict, humor and pathos in Nazareth, where Ana makes a home with Jesus, his brothers, and their mother, Mary.
Ana's pent-up longings intensify amid the turbulent resistance to Rome's occupation of Israel, partially led by her brother, Judas. She is sustained by her fearless aunt Yaltha, who harbors a compelling secret.
When Ana commits a brazen act that puts her in peril, she flees to Alexandria, where startling revelations and greater dangers unfold, and she finds refuge in unexpected surroundings. Ana determines her fate during a stunning convergence of events considered among the most impactful in human history. Grounded in meticulous research and written with a reverential approach to Jesus's life that focuses on his humanity, The Book of Longings is an inspiring, unforgettable account of one woman's bold struggle to realize the passion and potential inside her, while living in a time, place and culture devised to silence her.
It is a triumph of storytelling both timely and timeless, from a masterful writer at the height of her powers. A marriage ends for what seem like noble reasons, but with irreparable consequences. A young woman holds on to an impossible dream even as she fights for her survival.
Two lovers reunite after unimaginable tragedy, both for their country and in their lives. A man falls to his death in slow motion, reliving the defining moments of the life he is about to lose. Set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean and beyond, here are eight emotionally absorbing stories, rich with hard-won wisdom and humanity. At once wide in scope and intimate, Everything Inside explores with quiet power and elegance the forces that pull us together or drive us apart, sometimes in the same searing instant.
Danticat's birthplace, Haiti, emerges in an almost mythic fashion. She has curated this slim volume, bringing its elements together to create a satisfying whole. A stunning collection that features some of the best writing of Danticat's brilliant career. For most of her life, Lauren Mahdian has been certain of two things: that her mother is dead, and that her father is a murderer.
Before the horrific tragedy, Lauren led a sheltered life on the banks of Long Island Sound, a haven of luxurious homes and seemingly perfect families. Years later, Lauren is surrounded by uncertainty. Startling revelations force her to peek under the floorboards of her carefully constructed memories, put aside the version of history that she has clung to so fiercely, and search for the truth of what really happened that fateful night long ago. Casey, a suburban New Yorker with a wry sense of humor, braves the dating scene after losing her husband.
And in six linked stories spanning a decade of her life, Lola Wilkerson navigates elopement, motherhood, and lingering questions about who she wants to be when she grows up. The bonds between three picture-perfect—but viciously protective—mothers and their close-knit sons are tested during one unforgettable summer in a gripping novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Jetsetters.
Whitney, Annette, and Liza have grown thick as thieves as they have raised their children together for fifteen years. While each of them has their own set of values and backgrounds, they share the belief that they can shelter their children from an increasingly dangerous world. Or so they think. One night, the three women have been enjoying happy hour when their boys come back on bicycles from a late-night dip in their favorite swimming hole.
The boys share a secret—news that will shatter the perfect world their mothers have so painstakingly created. Gifty is a fifth year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford University's School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behaviour in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction.
Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her. But even as she turns to hard science to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith, and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive.
Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief--a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written and emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi's phenomenal debut. Being an actress gives me the luxury of discovering myself. All the feelings that came up from playing Alicia allowed me to look back at my life and tap into my own vulnerability.
My personal fear of the unknown reared its ugly head as I studied this character, most likely stemming from the ever-present unpredictability of my childhood.
Raised between two divorced parents, often on different continents, Julianna quickly learned how to be of value to her eccentric mother and her absent father. Raised in fairly unconventional ways in various homes in Paris, England, New York, and New Hampshire, Julianna's role among the turmoil and uncertainty that her parents generated, was to comfort those around her, find organization among the disorder, and eventually make her way in the world as a young adult and eventually an Award-winning actress.
Along the way, there were failed romances, difficult choices, and overwhelming rejections. But there was also the moment that fate, faith, and talent assembled in a perfect storm that lead to the roles of a lifetime, both professionally and personally.
Sunshine Girl is an accomplished coming of age story that offers readers a rich sense of relatability as well as the intimate details of a life unimagined" Maisel—from the acclaimed author of The Floating Feldmans. In its heyday, The Golden Hotel was the crown jewel of the hotter-than-hot Catskills vacation scene. For more than sixty years, the Goldman and Weingold families — best friends and business partners — have presided over this glamorous resort which served as a second home for well-heeled guests and celebrities.
But the Catskills are not what they used to be — and neither is the relationship between the Goldmans and the Weingolds. As the facilities and management begin to fall apart, a tempting offer to sell forces the two families together again to make a heart-wrenching decision.
Can they save their beloved Golden or is it too late? Business and pleasure clash in this fast-paced, hilarious, nostalgia-filled story, where the hotel owners rediscover the magic of a bygone era of nonstop fun even as they grapple with what may be their last resort. Each carries private wounds and powerful secrets as they head for Texas, following roads rife with vigilantes and soldiers still fighting a war lost a decade before.
Beyond the swamps lie the limitless frontiers of Texas and, improbably, hope. Louisiana, For first-year teacher Benedetta Silva, a subsidized job at a poor rural school seems like the ticket to canceling her hefty student debt—until she lands in a tiny, out-of-step Mississippi River town. Augustine, Louisiana, is suspicious of new ideas and new people, and Benny can scarcely comprehend the lives of her poverty-stricken students. But amid the gnarled live oaks and run-down plantation homes lie the century-old history of three young women, a long-ago journey, and a hidden book that could change everything.
From the early explorers to space travelers and holiday jetsetters, those in transit have acknowledged both the benefits and downsides of life on the go. The Little Blue Book of Travel Wisdom is a collection of these musings on travel, be it for research purposes, business, or vacation, via a plane, a bus, or a train.
Skip to content. The Jetsetters. The Jetsetters Book Review:. The Jettsetters. The Jettsetters Book Review:. The Same Sky. The Same Sky Book Review:. How to Be Lost. How to Be Lost Book Review:. There is nothing left to discover about these characters when every facet of their practically non-existent personalities has been spelled out from the very first page. I love books that take a conventional premise and then spin the narrative in a different direction.
Sounds fun. Why was I suffering through the uncomfortable experience of acting as a voyeur into the lives of these two characters who bored me to tears? There was absolutely no intrigue, and absolutely no payoff for sticking with it as long as I did.
I thought the prose was terrible. It was trying so hard to come across as devil-may-care that I felt an acute sense of secondhand embarrassment for how much it did care.
Jamey is starting to operate in a trance, biting his lip. For a minute, an hour later, right before he comes again, with two tongues licking him like kittens, he understands everything. Is this supposed to be profound? I could not stop cringing the entire time I was reading this. But in an effort of not ending on a terribly negative note: none of my Goodreads friends who have read this have given it less than 4 stars.
Sorry White Fur , we were like oil and water from the beginning. Thank you Netgalley and Penguin First to Read for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review. Quotes are taken from an ARC copy and may be edited before publication. Oh nooo those excerpts are so cringy.
Even if a book tells a good story, poor writing can completely destroy it. But obviously it sounds like this book did not tell a good story, and I can totally sympathize with not being able to DNF it. And writing them can be therapeutic. Like Liked by 2 people. Writing negative reviews is SO cathartic. I secretly love it tbh. There is nothing more gratifying. And it comes a lot easier than writing positive reviews for me?!
Whenever I love a book I struggle so much to put the reason why into words, but negative reviews are so easy! Like Liked by 1 person. Netgalley is great, but it is also my worst enemy, lol. My one wish for that site is that they had a preview of the first few pages or so of the book, because I can usually tell from the first few sentences of a book if the writing style with agree with me or not. And I do feel bad sometimes giving a debut author a bad review. Negative reviews are SO much easier for me to write.
When I read a book I love, I want my review to do it justice, which can be hard sometimes to express in words why a book was so great! And then I love going through goodreads and finding other reviews that share my opinion, lol.
Like Liked by 3 people. Omg I know, I am addicted to Netgalley and it is such a problem. Obviously it would be impossible to monitor a system like that lol, but I can dream!!!
Hahaha I do the same thing, I was just going through and liking a bunch of negative reviews of this book, lol! I guess this is our compensation for having suffered through a terrible book. Unusual for me. Somehow I missed seeing this comment before now. Like Like. I sometimes mentally categorize books ones written by people who love words more than stories, and this sounds like a great example.
It was hard to narrow it down, too, for this review. I love nice writing as much as the next person, but to me there is such a distinction between solid prose that compliments a story, and purple prose like this that becomes the focus of the story. I felt that way about Fates and Furies and The Girls, both of which were really light on plot and really heavy on awkward out of place metaphors on every page. Not even the prospect of eagerly sharpening my poisoned pen for a scathing review got me more than 40 pages into that one.
White Fur was honestly even worse though, if you can believe it. White Fur had all of the profundity of Zoolander and none of the humor. Those are always the authors who want to tell instead of showing—they have to describe every detail in prose. Then it seems to become filler for me and I find that I simply skim over it, being annoyed at the author for making me wade through drivel that shows only their command of the thesaurus….
I had fallen asleep three nights in a row while reading it, then I read a plot summary to see if it was worth sticking with. That convinced me to move on to bigger and better things! Very true! The other thing The Girls had going for it was how short it was!
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