Do head on over to her site to check out other luscious poems that are on spread today. Poetry Friday is bound to be awesome this week with Tabatha Yeatts from The Opposite of Indifference hosting the festivities. I borrowed this book from the NIE Library as we celebrate Crazy Over Cybils until end of February. It is no wonder that I have fallen in love with Joyce Sidman’s Red Sings from Treetops: A Year in Colors as illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski, winner of the 2009 Poetry Category in Cybils. I have always been in love with colors – I especially like it if they shift, swirl, and swathe into difficult-sounding shades: aquamarine, crimson, boysenberry, burnt sienna. Asian Festival of Children’s Content (AFCC). Literary Voyage Around The World Reading Challenge 2018.#WomenReadWomen2019 (A Year Of Women Reading Women) Reading Progress.#ReadIntl2020 (Year Of International Literature) Reading Progress.#DecolonizeBookshelves2022 Reading Progress.#DecolonizeReading2023 Reading Progress.
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**For added review reading benefit, this Florence + the Machine song is a perfect pairing** Armfield manages to make Our Wives Under the Sea a novel in which you will find yourself both shivering and sobbing as it slowly pulls you under into its shadowy depths. ‘ The thing about losing someone isn’t the loss but the absence of afterward,’ Leah is told, and Armfield dives beneath the waves of loss to explore the void of absence and, at its heart, this novel is a moving meditation on grief and what it means to love a person. Most of the novel, however, recounts their relationship in contrast with the nearly-absent Leah of the present and the now-caregiver Miri who is at her wits end. On the surface this is a horror novel, rocking on the waves of perspectives between married couple Miri and Leah as they tell of Leah’s traumatic submarine accident that has left her slowly transforming from the person she once was in a series of ghastly and chilling scenes. Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield is a quiet earthquake, slowly rearranging your emotions through ever-growing tension and terror while simultaneously being incredibly tender. And this is how I spent my vacation travel time with a slow-burn, haunting and heartbreaking work that examines loss within the framework of horror, something most would probably not recommend as relaxation reading but for me it was infectiously perfect. When Florence Welch recommends a book, I have to read it. ‘ To know the ocean, I have always felt, is to recognize the teeth it keeps half-hidden.’ 6/25/2023 0 Comments Lake in the clouds sara donatiPerhaps it's because I'm older man now (I'm a little embarassed to admit this) but I was getting a little choked up at certain points in Lake in the Clouds. I just finished the third book in Sara Donati's series (first two: Into the Wilderness, Dawn on a Distant Shore). So begins a journey that will test the strength of the Bonners' love for one another-and bring Hannah to face the decision she has always dreaded: will she make a life for herself in a white world, or among her mother's people? Her determination places both her family and her heart in jeopardy, for a bounty hunter is afoot-and he is none other than Hannah's childhood friend and first love. A gifted healer, this striking young woman of two worlds finds herself in peril when a dangerously ill runaway slave is discovered near the family home and Hannah insists on nursing the outlaw. But despite a devastating personal loss, the Bonners persevere, with Hannah, Nathaniel's half-Indian daughter, working as a doctor in training. It is the spring of 1802 and the village of Paradise is still reeling from the typhoid epidemic of the previous summer. Now she takes on a new chapter in the life of Elizabeth and Nathaniel Bonner-as their brave and beautiful oldest daughter comes of age with a challenge that will change her forever. In her extraordinary novels Into the Wilderness and Dawn on a Distant Shore, award-winning author Sara Donati deftly captured the vast, untamed wilds of late-eighteenth-century New York and the trials and triumphs of the spirited Bonner family. 6/25/2023 0 Comments Adam ferguson when money diesAfter Claudia has left him, Adam makes one last attempt to play his trumpet-at a casino where Willie is appearing. When Vincent is unmercifully beaten up by three white youths, Adam stands helplessly by, stunned by the injustice and violence that seem to plague his life. Claudia goes along and is happy to see that Adam is trying to control both his temper and his drinking. With Vincent, a young musician, as the only white member of his troupe, Adam reluctantly accepts. In trouble because of the Cincinnati walkout, Adam is now forced to grovel before a ruthless agent, Manny, who sadistically offers him a tour of one-nighters in the segregated South. Despite Adam's heavy drinking and bad temper, Claudia comes to understand him, and eventually she falls in love with him. Claudia's grandfather explains that Adam is guilt-ridden because he feels responsible for the death of his wife and child in a car accident 10 years earlier. Intrigued by the young woman, Adam flirts with her but is rejected. Returning to New York City, Adam finds that his best friend, Nelson Davis, has lent his apartment to Willie "Sweet Daddy" Ferguson and his granddaughter, Claudia, a civil rights activist. Black trumpet player Adam Johnson stalks off a Cincinnati bandstand when a white patron heckles him. 6/25/2023 0 Comments Author day of the jackalThe French secret service, particularly its covert operations directorate (the Action Service), is remarkably effective in infiltrating the terrorist organisation with their own informants, allowing them to seize and interrogate the OAS operations commander, Antoine Argoud. Following the apprehension of Bastien-Thiry and various other conspirators, the French security forces wage a short but extremely vicious underground war with the terrorists of the OAS, a militant right-wing group who believe de Gaulle to be a traitor to France after his grant of independence to Algeria. The book begins in 1962 with the (historical) failed attempt on de Gaulle's life plotted by, among others, Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry in the Paris suburb of Petit-Clamart. Plot summary Part One: Anatomy of a Plot The subsequent plot, however, is fiction. The novel is historical fiction: The OAS, as described did exist and the book opens with an accurate depiction of the attempt to assassinate de Gaulle by Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry on 22 August 1962. The novel remains popular, and in 2003 it was listed on the BBC's survey The Big Read. The novel received admiring reviews and praise when first published in 1971, and it received a 1972 Best Novel Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. The Day of the Jackal (1971) is a political thriller novel by English author Frederick Forsyth about a professional assassin who is contracted by the OAS, a French dissident paramilitary organisation, to kill Charles de Gaulle, the President of France. It seems a bit thin, as premises go, but I assure you that what follows is anything but. But then become separated at the Market outside the Tower itself, and the quest to reunite sets off a series of events that easily fills four novels and probably could’ve managed five. So I’ll retreat to the premise: stuffy schoolteacher Thomas Senlin takes his young wife on a honeymoon at the wondrous Tower of Babel. The plot of the first book is hard to describe, and the late-arriving series plot is not something to spoil before starting. But after a nearly two-year journey through the recently-completed tetralogy, I’m comfortable saying that the origin story has nothing on the series itself. The story of how the world came to know about The Books of Babel is pretty compelling on its own. If you’re not on the fantasy subreddit, or if you’re not a follower of the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off, you may not know the story of Senlin Ascends, a book that languished in obscurity for years before a last-ditch entry in SPFBO sparked a chain of events that turned it into something of a cult classic and ultimately led to Josiah Bancroft accepting a four-book deal with Orbit. 6/24/2023 0 Comments The ravenhood trilogyWith the lies I’ve told, the life I’ve led, my mistakes are beginning to catch up with me, day by day, one by one. Yet, she demands it still, the useless heart of the ruthless thief and shameless villain she fell for. Until she unearthed the starving vessel inside, forced me to acknowledge it, forced me to understand that I’m capable of bleeding the same as any other. Through the years, I lived more as an enigma than a man.įor so long, I denied I had a beating heart of my own. I’ve lived the entirety of my life wrapped up in subterfuge for one purpose-revenge. FEELS!Īmazon US | Amazon UK | Amazon CA | Amazon AU The Finish Line, the explosive conclusion in The Ravenhood Trilogy from best-selling author, Kate Stewart, is live! Get ready for a sinfully hot, angsty, unconventional and twisted love story filled with suspense, a little action, and ALL. I did find the pace a little slow (the book is over 700 pages, maybe I just haven’t read such a long book in a while) and oddly, it’s not really all plot or all character… now how to explain that. Somehow, although The Eustace Diamonds is the third in Trollope’s Palliser series, I kept the title in mind because Nancy Pearl (famous Seattle librarian and author of Book Lust and More Book Lust) recommended it (or at least I think she did) and after trying and failing to get into The Way We Live Now, I finally bought this one and then, with Eva at A Striped Armchair mentioning reading 600 pages of Trollope in 24 hours, I was determined to finally read some myself. (Later, when the rain turned to snow, a Harry Potter movie became necessary…) As the thick grey rain came down today, I settled in with a cup of hot chocolate to finish my first Anthony Trollope novel, The Eustace Diamonds. 6/24/2023 0 Comments Blink book malcolm gladwellGladwell also rediscovers something Poe described in “The Haunted Palace”: our eyes and our faces are windows to the soul. We have a power lunch with some professional food-tasters-the author quips that it was like cello-shopping with Yo-Yo Ma. (Unconventional people sometimes surprise.) We ponder the odd political rise of Warren G. We learn about the Aeron chair, All in the Family, Lee at Chancellorsville. There are stories of a rock star fighting the odds, of cops shooting an innocent man who looked suspicious, of Coca-Cola making a big marketing mistake. The author’s great strength lies in his stories, and here he crafts a number of engaging ones: an account of art experts fooled by a fake a summary of how a psychologist, looking at an hourlong video of a married couple conversing, can predict with 95% accuracy if they will divorce an unnerving narrative about the Millennium Challenge, a war game in which a maverick commander deals a devastating blow to the bean-counting rule-followers on the team that was supposed to win. Gladwell’s second entry into the aren’t-our-brains-amazing genre ( The Tipping Point, 2000) has an Obi-Wan Kenobi flavor, a “trust-your- feelings-Luke” antirationalism that attempts, in some ways, to deconstruct the Force. We need to place more trust in our “thin-slicer”-our capacity to make instant judgments-but we also need to sharpen its edge more keenly with experience and education. 6/24/2023 0 Comments Skyscraper cinderella by k websterWhat I am not used to and I definitely wasn’t a fan of was that Win’s kinks were humiliation and name-calling (slut, whore, etc). He is instantly smitten by her because she is not complying to his demands as staff do. The first book, Skyscraper Cinderella, was an introduction to Ash, an 18 (19?) year old girl who managed to get herself in trouble by eating candy in a company where the hero (Winston) works. The ARC copy was given five days before release and I thought I wouldn’t read it so fast.ĪRC was made out of three parts, three books that don’t really have a huge cliffhanger in between them but it is more of a continuation of the story. I didn’t know this was a trilogy when I signed up for this book so when I found out I wasn’t exactly thrilled. If you follow my blog or read my reviews for a while then you know I’m not a fan of trilogies. Deliciously gripping from the first to the last page! |