Lady Tremaine is Rachel Hochhauser’s first novel. It is a retelling of Cinderella from the perspective of the “wicked” stepmother. I’ll admit the pretty cover is the reason why I bought this book, and it is always a treat when the story turns out just to be as good as its cover.
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Evelyn Clarke is the pseudonym for V.E. Schwab and Cat Clarke, and The Ending Writes Itself is their first novel written together. It is an entertaining mystery story, although I found it too easy to figure out whodunnit.
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The Girl with a Thousand Faces is The Book Eaters author Sunyi Dean’s second novel. I absolutely love the haunting cover of this novel, but I am sorry to say that I do not feel as strongly for the contents of the story.
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Land is the eagerly anticipated new novel from Maggie O’Farrell, author of The Marriage Portrait and Hamnet, which was recently made into an Oscar winning film. I really enjoyed reading this novel and O’Farrell has found a place on my list of authors whose new books I will always look forward to reading.
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Wandering Stars is Tommy Orange’s second novel and a sequel of sorts to There There. I’ve been sitting on this book since last fall because I knew it was going to be a difficult read, and yes, it is difficult to read because it is sad and tragic, but Orange’s writing is so devastating beautiful that it helped propel me through the book.
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An Awfully Big Adventure was originally published in 1989 and is set in Liverpool in 1950. Beryl Bainbridge was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for this novel, and was nominated four other times, but never won. I bought An Awfully Big Adventure from Daunt Books in Marylebone, London on my recent trip to the UK. I bought this novel because it is supposed to be a “darkly comic novel” about a theatre company, but I do not find anything comic about An Awfully Big Adventure because all the characters in the novel are pathetic.
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I feel like mystery thrillers these days are all about the shock factor rather than crafting a good mystery story that makes sense. Tiffany Crum’s This Story Might Save Your Life is no exception. Did I devour this book to find out what happens at the end? Of course I did. I am like a cat; curiosity got the better of me. Did I mostly dislike this book while I was reading it? Also, of course I did. I have really got to stop reading overly hyped mystery novels.
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I bought The Blood of Others during my trip to Paris last year from the Shakespeare and Company bookstore. It felt appropriate to buy a book written by a French author, and I choose The Blood of Others because it is about fascism in Europe before and during WWII, which feels like a timely topic given the current global political climate.
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If you like novels with a protagonist who is a narcissistic, mean, pseudo-Christian tradwife Instagram influencer, then Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear is for you. And even if that does not sound like your cup of tea, I think you should still read this book because it will suck you in and you won’t want to escape it until you have finished the last page, even with its absolutely terrible main character.
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There are two reasons why I bought Japanese Gothic: 1. The word “Gothic” in the title. 2. It is a dual timeline story supposedly involving a ghost. Japanese Gothic is an unexpected read. I think I like it, but it’s hard to tell with the melancholy I feel every time I think about it.
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