Tag: book blogger

Book Review, Fiction, Historical Fiction

The Women by Kristin Hannah ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪.5
Genre: Historical Fiction

When Frances, “Frankie’s” brother leaves to serve in Vietnam during the war, she makes the bold decision to follow him and become an army nurse. Arriving in Vietnam, she is faced with horror and chaos she never could have imagined but, bolstered by the other nurses who become fast friends, Frankie soon finds intense meaning and pride in her work.

This book was wholly immersive and captivating. It’s clear Hannah did an extensive amount of research before writing this book and I felt like I could see everything Frankie was experiencing perfectly. Frankie is a heroic and believably flawed character. There are moments she is so admirable and moments when she makes decisions that are so clearly wrong for her. Her life during and after Vietnam was not easy, and the book follows her as she is met with hurdle after hurdle.

I absolutely adored the friends Frankie made in Vietnam and the way they showed up for her over and over even as they each chose different paths upon their return to the states. The bond of their shared experiences made for such a tigh friendship that was depicted wonderfully. All of the characters in fact, were so well written, detailed and nuanced, whether that made me love them or hate them.

Toward the end of the book, there are a lot of BIG THINGS that happen to Frankie back to back. This is when the story lost me a fraction. It just felt like too much crammed in too little of a timeline. Other than that, this is an incredible read.

Check out my bookstagram: @Treat.your.shelf
Buy The Women at an indie bookstore near you
The Women on Goodreads

Book Review, Memoir, Nonfiction

Down the Drain by Julia Fox ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪
Genre: Memoir

I read Down the Drain for a book club having no idea who Julia Fox is and, to be honest, I still don’t really know who she is. This memoir follows Julia’s life from the time she’s very young to present day. It paints a picture of a child who was denied love from her parents and forced to fend for herself from a young age.

Her time in NYC featured lots of drugs, a sugar daddy, and her escapades as a dominatrix. From there, we follow Julia to New Orleans and are chaotically introduced to friends who seem to come out of nowhere. It was a little hard to keep up with the pacing.

This is an overview of Julia’s life without any reflection. She tells her story exactly as it happens. It was fascinating to read about a journey so different from mine and to see how she was able to fight for herself and become famous (for what exactly, I’m still not sure). It was hard to see her make the same mistakes over and over without commenting on that at all, but I guess that’s either not the kind of book she wanted to write, or that self-awareness doesn’t exist. I think she woke up one day and said “I’m going to write a memoir” and that was all the forethought that went into it.

Check out my bookstagram: @Treat.your.shelf
Buy Down the Drain at an indie bookstore near you
Down the Drain on Goodreads

Book Review, Romance

Better Left Unsent by Lia Louis ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪
Genre: Romance

I’ve been a huge fan of Lia Louis’s previous books, but there was something lacking from Better Left Unsent. The premise was unusual and had a lot of promise: Millie writes down her thoughts, the ones she would never say out loud, in draft emails as a way of releasing them. One day, she finds that all her drafts were delivered. Millie is left to pick up the pieces of her life when her deepest thoughts have been shared with the exact people who were never supposed to see them.

Louis always writes wonderfully quirky and loveable characters, and this was no exception. Millie and her friends seem realistic in their quirks and I loved spending time with them. Although the romance was on the back burner for much of the book, I really enjoyed Jack and Millie’s chemistry. It was clear that they complemented each other wonderfully and I was so rooting for them.

The premise definitely did not feel deep enough to sustain the whole book. Millie’s constant need to clean up after herself/the emails got old pretty quickly and there wasn’t much else plot-wise to keep me hooked.

The loveable characters and promise of romance kept me reading, but the charm I expect from Louis’s books wasn’t sustained throughout.

Check out my bookstagram: @Treat.your.shelf
Buy Better Left Unsent at an indie bookstore near you
Better Left Unsent on Goodreads

Book Review, thriller

The Teacher by Frieda McFadden ~ Book Revie

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪
Genre: Thriller

This book is nottt going to be for everyone. It’s one of the more twisted McFadden books, focusing on the relationship between Addie, a high school student, and her English teacher, Nate. Nate makes Addie feel special at a time in her life when she’s at her lowest of lows and no other students want to spend time with her. As their relationship escalates, she quickly becomes obsessively jealous of Nate’s wife Eve, who herself feels trapped in a loveless marriage.

McFadden’s short, snappy chapters always make her books breeze by and this was no exception. Told from alternating perspectives, I loved getting to know the secrets each of the main characters was harboring. We know from the prologue that someone ends up digging a grave and although I guessed pretty early on who it was for, I couldn’t wait to see how we would get there.

In typical McFadden fashion, there was a big old twist at the end. At first I was shocked in the way only a truly twisty twist can do, but if I think about it too much it just…doesn’t make sense. It didn’t put me off the whole book, but it definitely could have been better thought out.

Check out my bookstagram: @Treat.your.shelf
Buy The Teacher at an indie bookstore near you
The Teacher on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction, thriller

First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪.5
Genre: Thriller

Ooh this was a twisty one! Evie Porter is living an idyllic American life with her handsome successful boyfriend Ryan, or is she? We quickly come to learn that ‘Evie’ is a fake identity assumed for her job working for the mysterious Mr. Smith. Evie has completed a number of questionable jobs for her employer, but is starting to question how much she can trust him. She’s also starting to quite like her life with Ryan.

This story splits the narrative between past and present, introducing many of the different identities Evie has adopted over the years and the jobs they have been associated with. Not gonna lie, I could not keep track of them all. I think including so many was supposed to paint a clear picture of how her relationship with Mr. Smith evolved over time, but it each vignette seemed so separate that it was hard for me to tie everything together chronologically and cohesively in my mind.

I did enjoy getting to see the true relationships that Evie made throughout the years and how she was able to either get help from them in the future as her cover is threatened, or to manipulate them based on past knowledge and experience. She was smart and crafty and made for a fun protagonist.

Evie is primarily trying to figure out what Mr. Smith’s intent is throughout the book, particularly when she finds herself being set up for a crime that happened in her vicinity during a past job. While she digs into these issues, she also has to figure out what to tell Ryan and how to keep their relationship in tact. There was a lot going on, which made this book go fast.

I definitely didn’t see the ending coming, and it made me rethink much of what I’d been told throughout the book, which I love from a thriller. It was a really satisfying wrap-up to Evie’s character and made her like her even more.

Check out my bookstagram: @Treat.your.shelf
Buy First Lie Wins at an indie bookstore near you
First Lie Wins on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction, Magical Realism

The Good Part by Sophie Cousens ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪.5
Genre: Romance/Magical Realism
Read if you liked: The Seven Year Slip

Ooh I loved this book. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times: I’m a sucker for a story with a whisper of magical realism. In The Good Part, Lucy is tired of struggling through her days as a defeated-feeling twenty-six year old. When she stops into a little shop to hide from the rain and notices a whimsical wishing machine, she makes a wish to skip ahead to the good part of her life. When she wakes up, Lucy finds that her wish has been granted.

I was definitely stresseddd for Lucy at times as she tries to adjust to her new life in the future and scared that she would really screw things up. There were moments, particularly with her husband, that were heartbreaking as she tries to communicate her reality while also feeling utterly disconnected from the life around her. I was obsessed with the fact that her little son was trying so hard to help her find her time machine. Their relationship was so sweet and I loved its unconventional nature.

Lucy quickly realizes that skipping out on a huge chunk of her life is perhaps not exactly what she wanted for herself. As she grows closer to the new people in her life, she’s forced to decide if she wanted to go back in time and get to live out all those missed years even though there is no guarantee that her actions will lead her back to this exact future.

Spending time with Lucy and her friends and family was such a joy. I loved the support systems around her and seeing everyone’s attempts to help her. The dilemma she has to deal with was especially thought-provoking and made my heart hurt for her in the way only great writing can do.

Check out my bookstagram: @Treat.your.shelf
Buy The Good Part at an indie bookstore near you
The Good Part on Goodreads

Book Review, Nonfiction

The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee ~ Book Review

Morgan

Nonfiction
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪

In The Sum of Us, McGhee paints a portrait of the zero-sum mentality as it pertains to racism. Through interviews across America, she shows how harmful the mindset that one race, or person, benefiting innately harms someone else is to everyone as a whole. McGhee utilizes real-life examples of people’s perceptions and historical incidents to show how the zero-sum game has played out across the country and what benefits could have been gained from a more communal mindset.

McGhee is clearly an expert in her field and her insights on the detriments of racism to the economy were stark. She paints a hopeful picture of how working as a community to address harmful laws and policies would get us much further in terms of positive economic changes for the masses. I wished there were a few more concrete examples of how her recommendations could be implemented, but I guess the focus of the book was more so on recognizing the problem and its impacts.

Overall, this was an eye-opening book that covers the historical and modern-day implications of the zero-sum game, as it pertains to racism, on the American economy.

Check out my bookstagram: @Treat.your.shelf
Buy The Sum of Us at an indie bookstore near you
The Sum of Us on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction, thriller

The Housemaid by Freida McFadden ~ Book Review

Morgan

Thriller
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪

The Housemaid is a pretty standard domestic thriller, but man did it suck me in. Millie, recently out of prison, is desperate to find employment and thinks she hit the jackpot when Nina Winchester hires her as a live-in housemaid. Although her attic room that has a lock on the outside is a littttle concerning, Millie’s just thankful to not be living in her car anymore. Soon, Nina’s unpredictable cruelty begins to weigh on Millie.

This was the kind of thriller where I knew things were not as they seemed, but I was always one step behind. I had a general sense that the relationships within the household were being influenced by something I was in the dark about and I couldn’t stop reading until I knew more. There’s a perspective shift from Millie to Nina partway through the book that I was not expecting but loved. Getting the opposite perspective put the first half of the book wonderfully into perspective.

Ultimately, the ending of this book really sealed the deal for me. Even though we did get some different points of view throughout, the ending showed just how much calculation and manipulation were going on behind the scenes and it was so satisfying. I will definitely be reading more Freida McFadden!

Check out my bookstagram: @Treat.your.shelf
Buy The Housemaid at an indie bookstore near you
The Housemaid on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction

Silver Girl by Elin Hilderbrand ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪
Fiction

When Meredith finds out that her husband cheated his investors out of billions of dollars, her world is turned upside down. Meredith was truly in the dark about her husband’s crimes, but finds herself struggling to convince anyone or to know who to trust. When Meredith hears from her old friend Connie with an offer to stay with her on Nantucket, it seems like the perfect place to escape and regroup.

This was one of Elin Hilderbrand’s less standout stories for me. The Nantucket setting was, as ever, beautifully depicted, and I appreciated the emotional depth of Meredith’s character and her attempts to pull her life back together. The backlash Meredith received and her trying to sort through how to deal with her situation made for a really compelling story and I appreciated the premise a lot. Because this story was so focused on Meredith and Connie’s emotional states, I found the actual plot and action to be a bit lacking, especially for such a long book.

Check out my bookstagram: @Treat.your.shelf
Buy Silver Girl at an indie bookstore near you
Silver Girl on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction, thriller

Stone Cold Fox by Rachel Koller Croft ~ Book Review

Morgan

Thriller
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪.5

Stone Cold Fox has all the makings of the kind of thriller that I love, including a conniving female protagonist manipulating a man to get what she wants. Bea is both a high powered career woman and *this close* to marrying into Collin Case’s wealthy family. Bea grew up watching her mom use and be used by men in an attempt to get ahead in life and it is clear that Bea learned a lot from her, but holds a lot of resentment for the things her mom made her do, which slowly come to light throughout Bea’s story.

I devoured this book, but I had some trouble with Bea’s main conflict with Collin’s childhood best friend Gale, who has it out for her. There interactions didn’t seem realistic and felt forced into the narrative to me. I can’t exactly pinpoint what it was about them, but this part of the story– and particularly how it ended– left something to be desired.

Check out my bookstagram: @Treat.your.shelf
Buy Stone Cold Fox at an indie bookstore near you
Stone Cold Fox on Goodreads