Waiting on Wednesday

Can't-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Wishful Endings to spotlight and talk about the books we're excited about that we have yet to read. Generally, they are books that have yet to be released but don't have to be. It is based on Waiting on Wednesday, hosted by the fabulous at Breaking the Spine.

In this atmospheric southern cozy debut, Madeline Brimley returns to the bookstore she inherited, discovering that small towns hold deadly secrets.

Madeline Brimley left small town Georgia many years ago to go to college and pursue her dreams on the stage. Her dramatic escapades are many but success has eluded her, leaving her at loose ends. But then she gets word that not only has her beloved, eccentric Aunt Rose passed, but she's left Madeline her equally eccentric bookstore housed in an old Victorian mansion in the small college town of Enigma. But when she arrives in her beat-up Fiat to claim The Old Juniper Bookstore, and restart her life, Madeline is faced with unexpected challenges. The gazebo in the back yard is set ablaze and a late night caller threatens to burn the whole store down if she doesn't leave immediately.

But Madeline Brimley, not one to be intimidated, ignores the threats and soldiers on. Until there's another fire and a murder in the store itself. Now with a cloud of suspicion falling over her, it's up to Madeline to untangle the skein of secrets and find the killer before she herself is the next victim.

Why I'm Waiting:  You had me at small town and secrets!

HAPPY READING!!

New Release Tuesday

The world is more astonishing, more miraculous, and more wonderful than our wildest imaginings. In this brilliant and passionately persuasive book, Katherine Rundell takes us on a globe-spanning tour of the world's most awe-inspiring animals currently facing extinction.

Consider the seahorse: couples mate for life and meet each morning for a dance, pirouetting and changing colors before going their separate ways, to dance again the next day. The American wood frog survives winter by allowing itself to freeze solid, its heartbeat slowing until it stops altogether. Come spring, the heart kick-starts itself spontaneously back to life. As for the lemur, it lives in matriarchal troops led by an alpha female (it’s not unusual for female ring-tailed lemurs to slap males across the face when they become aggressive). Whenever they are cold or frightened, they group together in what’s known as a lemur ball, paws, and tails intertwined, to form a furry mass as big as a bicycle wheel.

But each of these extraordinary animals is endangered or holds a sub-species that is endangered. This urgent, inspiring book of essays dedicated to 23 unusual and underappreciated creatures is a clarion call insisting that we look at the world around us with new eyes—to see the magic of the animals we live among, their unknown histories and capabilities, and above all how lucky we are to tread the same ground as such vanishing treasures.

Beautifully illustrated, and full of inimitable wit and intellect, Vanishing Treasures is a chance to be awestruck and lovestruck, to reckon with the beauty of the world, its fragility, and its strangeness.

HAPPY READING!!

Mini Reviews

This was a lot of fun! I feel like I learned more with this book than my entire time in a public high school. Maybe because this was more fun since the science was based on the popular monsters and really why they wouldn't be able to exist in the real world. It was full of fun facts about actual creatures that do (or well did at one point) in reality. I will never unknow that T-rexs sometimes turned a corner too fast, fell down, and sometimes died because of their own size. Best new fun fact of the year. I will be telling everyone this. If you're a fan of monsters and cryptids, pick this one up. I snagged this from the library because I wanted to see all the illustrations in full color (I have a B&W Kindle). Had a super fun couple of days reading this after work in bed with my little book light. 

I'm a huge fan of Steve Niles,  30 Days of Night is one of my favorites and October Faction was brilliant.  So, I didn't really think twice about stuffing this into my bag when I found it on the library shelf. In true fashion with my luck, this was part of a series, and this was not the first book. In fact, I'm not sure where this falls in the series because until I picked this up I'd never heard of this series. However, this was a stand-alone, so I was able to pick up the idea of the story and quite enjoy it. I've even added the full series to my TBR.

HAPPY READING!!

Cover Runway Sunday

   

They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but we all know we do it. Sometimes the cover initially catches our eye, drawing us to give a book a closer look. It's the first thing we see, our first impression. Every Sunday I'm going to post some of my favorite covers of books coming soon!

There’s power in a book…

They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to the Wellwood Home in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.

Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, terrified and alone. Under the watchful eye of the stern Miss Wellwood, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. There’s Rose, a hippie who insists she’s going to find a way to keep her baby and escape to a commune. And Zinnia, a budding musician who knows she’s going to go home and marry her baby’s father. And Holly, a wisp of a girl, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.

Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything they’re allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what’s best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid…and it’s usually paid in blood.

HAPPY READING!!

Reading Update

. 

First things first, before jumping into what I'm currently reading, I hit my reading goal for the year! 70 books was my goal this year, and I was pretty confident I was going to manage it. I did think it would take me a little longer than the end of October. Super proud of myself on that one! Now I'm curious as to how far past this goal I can hit. As for my page goal according to Storygraph, I'm on track to hit that goal by the end of the year. Currently, I'm nine pages ahead of that goal. So there is still a chance. I haven't hit my page goal in two years, so it would be amazing if this was the year!

I'm currently reading Weyward by Emilia Hurt and Monstrous by Carlyn Beccia. At the moment Weyward is a mixed bag for me because there are aspects I'm really loving, but there's one character who I'm not enjoying. Monstrous is about the science behind monsters and how they can't really exist. I will say this one turned out to be more science than I planned, and I wasn't planning on learning so much from a book about monsters. I'm hoping to both finish soon, Weyward is back at the library soon, so I'm going to need to wrap the last hundred pages over the next couple of days.

Both of my TBR stacks would love if I could power through more books. Especially since there is a book sale in my future today!

HAPPY READING!!

Night Worms Unboxing

November Theme: Horror Royalty

Listen, I know we get spoilers of the books before the mail comes so those of us who pre-order books, don't pre-order these books. I love that Night Worms does this, but sometimes the books coming in the package aren't authors I normally pick up. So then by the time the package comes, I've forgotten which books are coming. So it's like a double surprise. Both that Night Worms is here and which books came. Sometimes I get the months mixed up. Anyway, that was a very long-winded way to say I had forgotten which books were coming this month. So I was super excited to see that one was by Nick Cutter.

This is the second Nick Cutter book I've put on my TBR which is probably a sign that I should pick one of these up before the end year, which is fast approaching. 

Now for the unpopular opinion, Stephen Graham Jones is a gray area for me. I want to like his stuff, it always sounds so good and creepy. But, twice now I've been disappointed. However, I will give this one a try because I will concede that the last two times I read his books I was rushed to get them back to the library. Maybe the third time is the charm.

I loved everything about the goodie bag this month. The hot chocolate is going to the back of my rotation because I love Moonstruck. So this will wait for when it's a little colder and my walk from the bus freezes my toes in my Converse. As for the stickers, I've tucked them away because I don't know where I'm going to put them yet. Both of my water bottles and coffee cup are covered, as well as my notebook. Maybe I need to find a place for a second book cart...

As always, a huge thank you to the ladies of Night Worms for this month's package. It was brilliant!

HAPPY READING!!

Waiting on Wednesday

Can't-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Wishful Endings to spotlight and talk about the books we're excited about that we have yet to read. Generally, they are books that have yet to be released but don't have to be. It is based on Waiting on Wednesday, hosted by the fabulous at Breaking the Spine.

How Victorian male doctors used false science to argue that women were unfit for anything but motherhood—and the brilliant doctor who defied them

After Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from medical school, more women demanded a chance to study medicine. Barred entrance to universities like Harvard, women built their own first-rate medical schools and hospitals. Their success spurred a chilling backlash from elite, white male physicians who were obsessed with eugenics and the propagation of the white race. Distorting Darwin’s evolution theory, these haughty physicians proclaimed in bestselling books that women should never be allowed to attend college or enter a profession because their menstrual cycles made them perpetually sick. Motherhood was their constitution and duty.

Into the midst of this turmoil marched tiny, dynamic Mary Putnam Jacobi, daughter of New York publisher George Palmer Putnam and the first woman to be accepted into the world-renowned Sorbonne medical school in Paris. As one of the best-educated doctors in the world, she returned to New York for the fight of her life. Aided by other prominent women physicians and suffragists, Jacobi conducted the first-ever data-backed, scientific research on women's reproductive biology. The results of her studies shook the foundations of medical science and higher education. Full of larger than life characters and cinematically written, The Cure for Women documents the birth of a sexist science still haunting us today as the fight for control of women’s bodies and lives continues.

Why I'm Waiting: I like it when my nonfiction has a side of rage. This is going to be a wild ride.

HAPPY READING!!

New Release Tuesday

Using suspenseful podcast clips to weave a twisty tale of a missing student and her sister who is desperate for answers, The Lake of Lost Girls is perfect for fans of I Have Some Questions for You.

It's 1998, and female students are going missing at Southern State University in North Carolina. But freshman Jessica Fadley, once a bright and responsible student, is going through her own struggles. Just as her life seems to be careening dangerously out of control, she suddenly disappears.

Twenty-four years later, Jessica's sister Lindsey is desperately searching for answers and uses the momentum of a new chart-topping true crime podcast, Ten Seconds to Vanish, that focuses on the cold cases, to guide her own investigation. Soon, interest reaches fever pitch when the bodies of the long-missing women begin turning up at a local lake, which leads Lindsey down a disturbing road of discovery.

In the present, one sister seeks to untangle a complicated web of lies.
In the past, the other descends ever deeper into a darkness that will lead to her ultimate fate.

This propulsive and chilling suspense is a sharp examination of sisterhood and the culture of true crime.

HAPPY READING!!

Cover Runway Sunday

   

They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but we all know we do it. Sometimes the cover initially catches our eye, drawing us to give a book a closer look. It's the first thing we see, our first impression. Every Sunday I'm going to post some of my favorite covers of books coming soon!

The only thing sixteen-year-old Mullory Prudence has left of her mom is a warning: "Run if the strange finds you." But mysterious warnings don’t pay the bills or help take care of her sick Gran. And they certainly don’t make her miserable after-school job any more bearable. When unexpected letters start appearing in peculiar places––sealed in bags of dog food and hidden in the refrigerator––Mullory knows she should avoid them to heed her mother’s warning, but her curiosity thinks otherwise. She uncovers an invitation from Stoutmire Estate to compete in a game of Mystery Royale for the chance at a sizable inheritance.


Dizzy with the prospect of billions, Mullory enters the game only to unearth the true prize––the illusionary magical properties of Xavier Stoutmire, a recluse without an heir. A recluse who was expected to keep his magic in the family, especially when there isn’t enough for each member. With a prize worth killing for, the game is simple: be the first to solve the mystery––who killed Xavier Stoutmire? One week full of lavish parties dripping with enchantments, in a mansion brimming with clues of the past, and everyone’s a suspect. To win, Mullory will need to untangle a twisted family web and decide who she can trust…


Whitaker Stoutmire, the golden boy who’s harboring deadly secrets?

Ellison Stoutmire, his closed off twin, who saw something she shouldn’t have?

Lyric Stoutmire the youngest sibling, exiled by the family and burning with resentment?

Or Mateo Cruz, the only other outsider whose reserved manner allows him to hide in the shadows... At least at first.


But most of all, Mullory must ask herself, why? Why her? A question most strange, indeed.

HAPPY READING!!

November Spotlight Read

 

I love animals of all shapes and sizes, except spiders, they are devil with their legs and their mandibles.  I've read books on the creatures we've lost before I could see them with my eyes, but this isn't that book. This is about the amazing creatures that are almost extinct, are weird, and have been doing weird things to keep themselves alive. It's fully illustrated and I'm so excited to get my hands on this one!

The world is more astonishing, more miraculous, and more wonderful than our wildest imaginings. In this brilliant and passionately persuasive book, Katherine Rundell takes us on a globe-spanning tour of the world's most awe-inspiring animals currently facing extinction.

Consider the seahorse: couples mate for life and meet each morning for a dance, pirouetting and changing colors before going their separate ways, to dance again the next day. The American wood frog survives winter by allowing itself to freeze solid, its heartbeat slowing until it stops altogether. Come spring, the heart kick-starts itself spontaneously back to life. As for the lemur, it lives in matriarchal troops led by an alpha female (it’s not unusual for female ring-tailed lemurs to slap males across the face when they become aggressive). Whenever they are cold or frightened, they group together in what’s known as a lemur ball, paws, and tails intertwined, to form a furry mass as big as a bicycle wheel.

But each of these extraordinary animals is endangered or holds a sub-species that is endangered. This urgent, inspiring book of essays dedicated to 23 unusual and underappreciated creatures is a clarion call insisting that we look at the world around us with new eyes—to see the magic of the animals we live among, their unknown histories and capabilities, and above all how lucky we are to tread the same ground as such vanishing treasures.

Beautifully illustrated, and full of inimitable wit and intellect, Vanishing Treasures is a chance to be awestruck and lovestruck, to reckon with the beauty of the world, its fragility, and its strangeness.

HAPPY READING!!

October Wrap Up

READING GOAL MET! Seventy books read and everything from here on out is a bonus. Honesty, despite how busy I got this was a great reading month for me. I only DNFed one book, and everything else I read was perfect. It was a lot of small reads, but that's okay. Reading is reading, I met myself where I needed to. I won't force myself to read a long book when I don't have an attention span.

Sometimes when I'm busy I just want to read something short so I feel like I'm doing more than just going to work. So, short reads for the win! 

Also, did you know you could put more than one library card on your Libby account? I did not know this until I was talking to my sister-in-law last week. So we swapped cards, and while I haven't taken super advantage of her library yet. She wasted no time loading up on audiobooks, which I'm totally here for!

Now, on to my October Stats: 

Books Read: 10
BINGO Books: 2

A to Z Challenge: 1

Pages Read: 1160

Currently Reading: Weyward

Only one book for my A to Z Challenge because I've had so many library books. Like so many. Not only did a whole bunch of holds come in, but then I had time to wander around. So no it's a stack. I haven't had a stack of library books in a minute. Good thing it's been rainy and cold. Perfect weather to read all day.

I'm telling you this year's BINGO card is crazy. I only managed one square there too, and okay it was a double BINGO. These last few squares though, I don't know if I'll manage to knock them off. 

HAPPY READING!!