Saida's bookshelf: all en-US Tue, 08 Jul 2025 20:17:53 -0700 60 Saida's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg When We Were Sisters 60279775 An orphan grapples with gender, siblinghood, family, and coming-of-age as a Muslim in America in this lyrical debut novel from the acclaimed author of If They Come For Us

In this heartrending, lyrical debut work of fiction, Fatimah Asghar traces the intense bond of three orphaned siblings who, after their parents die, are left to raise one another. The youngest, Kausar, grapples with the incomprehensible loss of her parents as she also charts out her own understanding of gender; Aisha, the middle sister, spars with her crybaby younger sibling as she desperately tries to hold on to her sense of family in an impossible situation; and Noreen, the eldest, does her best in the role of sister-mother while also trying to create a life for herself, on her own terms.

As Kausar grows up, she must contend with the collision of her private and public worlds, and choose whether to remain in the life of love, sorrow, and codependency she's known or carve out a new path for herself. When We Were Sisters tenderly examines the bonds and fractures of sisterhood, names the perils of being three Muslim American girls alone against the world, and ultimately illustrates how those who've lost everything might still make homes in each other.]]>
352 Fatimah Asghar 0593133463 Saida 0 currently-reading 3.91 2022 When We Were Sisters
author: Fatimah Asghar
name: Saida
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/07/08
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]>
The Unworthy 214151601 The long-awaited new novel from the author of global sensation Tender Is the Flesh: a thrilling work of literary horror about a woman cloistered in a secretive, violent religious order, while outside the world has fallen into chaos.

From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe—cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe.

But when a stranger makes her way past the convent walls, joining the ranks of the unworthy, she forces the narrator to consider her long-buried past—and what she may be overlooking about the Enlightened. As the two women grow closer, the narrator is increasingly haunted by questions about her own past, the environmental future, and her present life inside the convent. How did she get to the Sacred Sisterhood? Why can’t she remember her life before? And what really happens when a woman is chosen as one of the Enlightened?

A searing, dystopian tale about climate crisis, ideological extremism, and the tidal pull of our most violent, exploitative instincts, this is another unforgettable novel from a master of feminist horror.]]>
192 Agustina Bazterrica 1668051885 Saida 2 3.61 2023 The Unworthy
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: Saida
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2025/07/08
date added: 2025/07/08
shelves:
review:

]]>
Immaculate Conception 217453576 From the author of Natural Beauty, set in the fiercely competitive art world, a novel about an obsessive friendship upended by a cutting-edge technology purported to enhance empathy and connection

Enka meets Mathilde in art school. Mathilde is a dizzyingly talented yet tortured artist whose star is on the rise—and Enka, struggling to make art that feels original, is immediately drawn to her. The two strike up an intense bond that soon turns codependent. But when Mathilde’s fame reaches new heights, Enka becomes desperate to keep her best friend close—no matter the cost.
 
Enka quickly falls in love with and marries a billionaire whose family’s company is funding an unconventional technology purported to heighten empathy, which could allow someone else to inhabit Mathilde’s mind and absorb the trauma from her brain. Soon, the boundaries between Mathilde and Enka begin to blur even further, setting in motion a disturbing series of events that forever changes their lives.

Blisteringly smart, thought-provoking, and shocking, Immaculate Conception deftly navigates big questions of art, technology, authorship, and what makes us human. Ling Ling Huang offers us a portrait of close friendship—achingly tender and twisted—that captures the tenuous line between love and possession that will haunt you long after you turn the final page.]]>
304 Ling Ling Huang 0593850432 Saida 0 to-read 3.99 2025 Immaculate Conception
author: Ling Ling Huang
name: Saida
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/07/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[A Strange and Stubborn Endurance (The Tithenai Chronicles, #1)]]> 58724793
Velasin vin Aaro never planned to marry at all, let alone a girl from neighboring Tithena. When an ugly confrontation reveals his preference for men, Vel fears he’s ruined the diplomatic union before it can even begin. But while his family is ready to disown him, the Tithenai envoy has a different plans: for Vel to marry his former intended’s brother instead.

Caethari Aeduria always knew he might end up in a political marriage, but his sudden betrothal to a man from Ralia, where such relationships are forbidden, comes as a shock.

With an unknown faction willing to kill to end their new alliance, Vel and Cae have no choice but to trust each other. Survival is one thing, but love―as both will learn―is quite another.

Byzantine politics, lush sexual energy, and a queer love story that is by turns sweet and sultry, Foz Meadows' A Strange and Stubborn Endurance is an exploration of gender, identity, and self-worth. It is a book that will live in your heart long after you turn the last page.]]>
544 Foz Meadows 1250829135 Saida 3 4.02 2022 A Strange and Stubborn Endurance (The Tithenai Chronicles, #1)
author: Foz Meadows
name: Saida
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/07/07
date added: 2025/07/07
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil]]> 215020997
This is a story about hunger.
1532. Santo Domingo de la Calzada.
A young girl grows up wild and wily—her beauty is only outmatched by her dreams of escape. But María knows she can only ever be a prize, or a pawn, in the games played by men. When an alluring stranger offers an alternate path, María makes a desperate choice. She vows to have no regrets.

This is a story about love.
1827. London.
A young woman lives an idyllic but cloistered life on her family’s estate, until a moment of forbidden intimacy sees her shipped off to London. Charlotte’s tender heart and seemingly impossible wishes are swept away by an invitation from a beautiful widow—but the price of freedom is higher than she could have imagined.

This is a story about rage.
2019. Boston.
College was supposed to be her chance to be someone new. That’s why Alice moved halfway across the world, leaving her old life behind. But after an out-of-character one-night stand leaves her questioning her past, her present, and her future, Alice throws herself into the hunt for answers . . . and revenge.

This is a story about life—
how it ends, and how it starts.
]]>
535 V.E. Schwab 1035064642 Saida 0 to-read 4.17 2025 Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
author: V.E. Schwab
name: Saida
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/07/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
The Poppy Fields 218431658 From the New York Times bestselling author of the smash-hit The MeasureRead with Jenna TODAY Show pick—comes a stunning speculative story of healing, self-discovery, forgiveness, and found friendship.

Welcome to the Poppy Fields, where there’s hope for even the most battered hearts to heal.

Here, in a remote stretch of the California desert, lies an experimental and controversial treatment center that allows those suffering from the heartache of loss to sleep through their pain...and keep on sleeping. After patients awaken from this prolonged state of slumber, they will finally be healed. But only if they’re willing to accept the potential shadowy side effects.

On a journey to this mystical destination are four very different strangers and one little dog: Ava, a book illustrator; Ray, a fireman; Sasha, an occupational therapist; Sky, a free spirit; and a friendly pup named PJ. As they attempt to make their way from the Midwest all the way west to the Poppy Fields—where they hope to find Ellis, its brilliant, enigmatic founder—each of their past secrets and mysterious motivations threaten to derail their voyage.

A high-concept speculative novel about heartache, hope, and human resilience, The Poppy Fields explores the path of grief and healing, a journey at once profoundly universal and unique to every person, posing the questions: How do we heal in the wake of great loss? And how far are we willing to go in order to be healed?]]>
324 Nikki Erlick 0063349337 Saida 0 to-read 3.82 2025 The Poppy Fields
author: Nikki Erlick
name: Saida
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/07/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
To Paradise 75665863
A BEST BOOK OF THE VOGUE • ESQUIRE • NPR • GOODREADS

To Paradise is a fin de siècle novel of marvelous literary effect, but above all it is a work of emotional genius. The great power of this remarkable novel is driven by Yanagihara’s understanding of the aching desire to protect those we love—partners, lovers, children, friends, family, and even our fellow citizens—and the pain that ensues when we cannot.

In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please (or so it seems). The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means. In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his father. And in 2093, in a world riven by plagues and governed by totalitarian rule, a powerful scientist’s damaged granddaughter tries to navigate life without him—and solve the mystery of her husband’s disappearances.

These three sections comprise an ingenious symphony, as recurring notes and themes deepen and enrich one A townhouse in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village; illness, and treatments that come at a terrible cost; wealth and squalor; the weak and the strong; race; the definition of family, and of nationhood; the dangerous righteousness of the powerful, and of revolutionaries; the longing to find a place in an earthly paradise, and the gradual realization that it can’t exist. What unites not just the characters, but these Americas, are their reckonings with the qualities that make us Fear. Love. Shame. Need. Loneliness.]]>
784 Hanya Yanagihara 0593315650 Saida 3 3.79 2022 To Paradise
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: Saida
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/06/29
date added: 2025/06/29
shelves:
review:

]]>
Natural Beauty 61420120 Sly, surprising, and razor-sharp, Natural Beauty follows a young musician into an elite, beauty-obsessed world where perfection comes at a staggering cost.

Our narrator produces a sound from the piano no one else at the Conservatory can. She employs a technique she learned from her parents—also talented musicians—who fled China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. But when an accident leaves her parents debilitated, she abandons her future for a job at a high-end beauty and wellness store in New York City.

Holistik is known for its remarkable products and procedures—from remoras that suck out cheap Botox to eyelash extensions made of spider silk—and her new job affords her entry into a world of privilege and a long-awaited sense of belonging. She becomes transfixed by Helen, the niece of Holistik’s charismatic owner, and the two strike up a friendship that hazily veers into more. All the while, our narrator is plied with products that slim her thighs, smooth her skin, and lighten her hair. But beneath these creams and tinctures lies something sinister.

A piercing, darkly funny debut, Natural Beauty explores questions of consumerism, self-worth, race, and identity—and leaves readers with a shocking and unsettling truth.]]>
272 Ling Ling Huang 0593472926 Saida 5 3.79 2023 Natural Beauty
author: Ling Ling Huang
name: Saida
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/06/28
date added: 2025/06/28
shelves:
review:
SO FREAKIN GOOD! in awe, loved it, a book hasn’t made me this excited in a while
]]>
Finna (LitenVerse, #1) 53110298
When an elderly customer at a Swedish big box furniture store—but not that one—slips through a portal to another dimension, it's up to two minimum-wage employees to track her across the multiverse and protect their company's bottom line. Multi-dimensional swashbuckling would be hard enough, but those two unfortunate souls broke up a week ago.

To find the missing granny, Ava and Jules will brave carnivorous furniture, swarms of identical furniture spokespeople, and the deep resentment simmering between them. Can friendship blossom from the ashes of their relationship? In infinite dimensions, all things are possible.]]>
136 Nino Cipri 1250245737 Saida 3 3.71 2020 Finna (LitenVerse, #1)
author: Nino Cipri
name: Saida
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2025/06/22
date added: 2025/06/22
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Escaping from Houdini (Stalking Jack the Ripper, #3)]]> 37946456
But then, privileged young women begin to go missing without explanation, and a series of brutal slayings shocks the entire ship. The disturbing influence of the Moonlight Carnival pervades the decks as the murders grow ever more freakish, with nowhere to escape except the unforgiving sea.

It's up to Audrey Rose and Thomas to piece together the gruesome investigation as even more passengers die before reaching their destination. But with clues to the next victim pointing to someone she loves, can Audrey Rose unravel the mystery before the killer's horrifying finale?]]>
437 Kerri Maniscalco 0316551708 Saida 4 3.98 2018 Escaping from Houdini (Stalking Jack the Ripper, #3)
author: Kerri Maniscalco
name: Saida
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2025/06/22
date added: 2025/06/22
shelves:
review:

]]>
Penance 75498191 One of Granta's Best Young British Novelists 2023

From the author of the cult hit Boy Parts comes a chilling, brilliantly told story of murder among a group of teenage girls—a powerful and disturbing novel as piercing in its portrait of young women as Emma Cline’s The Girls.

On a beach in a run-down seaside town on the Yorkshire coastline, sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson is set on fire by three other schoolgirls.

Nearly a decade after the horrifying murder, journalist Alec Z. Carelli has written the definitive account of the crime, drawn from hours of interviews with witnesses and family members, painstaking historical research, and most notably, correspondence with the killers themselves. The result is a riveting snapshot of lives rocked by tragedy, and a town left in turmoil.

But how much of the story is true?

Compulsively readable, provocative, and disturbing, Penance is a cleverly nuanced, unflinching exploration of gender, class, and power that raises troubling questions about the media and our obsession with true crime while bringing to light the depraved side of human nature and our darkest proclivities.]]>
336 Eliza Clark 0063327856 Saida 0 to-read 3.77 2023 Penance
author: Eliza Clark
name: Saida
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/06/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[A Deal with the Devil (The Grumpy Devils, #1)]]> 75250129 He might not be the devil, but working under him for six weeks is my idea of hell.

Hayes Flynn is an arrogant jerk known best for his scotch habit and the way he spreads his British “charm” all over Hollywood, never with the same woman twice.

He’s the last person I want to work for, except he has a face I can’t look away from, and the longer we’re together, the harder he is to hate. Because under that smug exterior is a heart he doesn’t want to show—one that was badly broken a decade earlier.

A part of me wants to fix it for him before I leave…but can I do it without breaking my own in the process?]]>
300 Elizabeth O'Roark Saida 1 4.10 2021 A Deal with the Devil (The Grumpy Devils, #1)
author: Elizabeth O'Roark
name: Saida
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2021
rating: 1
read at: 2025/06/12
date added: 2025/06/12
shelves:
review:

]]>
Severance 36348525
Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale and satire.]]>
291 Ling Ma 0374261598 Saida 5 3.89 2018 Severance
author: Ling Ma
name: Saida
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2025/06/01
date added: 2025/06/01
shelves:
review:

]]>
Young Mungo 58891551
As they fall in love, they dream of finding somewhere they belong, while Mungo works hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his big brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. And when several months later Mungo's mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland with two strange men whose drunken banter belies murky pasts, he will need to summon all his inner strength and courage to try to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future.

Imbuing the everyday world of its characters with rich lyricism and giving full voice to people rarely acknowledged in the literary world, Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the bounds of masculinity, the divisions of sectarianism, the violence faced by many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.]]>
390 Douglas Stuart 0802159559 Saida 3 4.37 2022 Young Mungo
author: Douglas Stuart
name: Saida
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/06/01
date added: 2025/06/01
shelves:
review:

]]>
Migrations 42121525
Epic and intimate, heartbreaking and galvanizing, Charlotte McConaghy's Migrations is an ode to a disappearing world and a breathtaking page-turner about the possibility of hope against all odds.]]>
256 Charlotte McConaghy 125020402X Saida 2 4.10 2020 Migrations
author: Charlotte McConaghy
name: Saida
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2025/05/21
date added: 2025/05/28
shelves:
review:
Surprised I didn’t love this book as I’ve heard amazing things and really wanted to like it! I just simply did not care. The main character was excruciatingly flat and dreary, out of all the sparse and oddly placed chapters detailing her past life, there was nothing that led me to care. I think the writing was beautiful and maybe the only redeeming quality of the novel. I just wanted more world building and context… this type of storytelling might just not be my style
]]>
Giovanni’s Room 406235 178 James Baldwin Saida 0 to-read 4.40 1956 Giovanni’s Room
author: James Baldwin
name: Saida
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1956
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1)]]> 52397
Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren’s father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others.

When fire destroys their compound, Lauren’s family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.]]>
345 Octavia E. Butler 0446675504 Saida 0 to-read 4.20 1993 Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1)
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Saida
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
Never Let Me Go 6334
And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed-even comforted-by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham's nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood-and about their lives now.]]>
288 Kazuo Ishiguro 1400078776 Saida 0 to-read 3.85 2005 Never Let Me Go
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Saida
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
Everything You Ever Wanted 42086151
Sometimes you don't get out of bed at all.

Then you hear about Life on Nyx, a programme that allows 100 lucky winners the chance to escape it all, move to another planet and establish a new way of life. One with meaning and purpose. One without Instagram and online dating. There's one caveat: if you go, you can never come back.

But you aren't worried about that.

After all, what on Earth could there possibly be to miss? ]]>
272 Luiza Sauma 0241363551 Saida 0 to-read 3.59 2019 Everything You Ever Wanted
author: Luiza Sauma
name: Saida
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
Hum 195791689 From the National Book Award–longlisted author of The Need comes an extraordinary novel about a wife and mother who—after losing her job to AI—undergoes a procedure that renders her undetectable to surveillance…but at what cost?

In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called “hums,” May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance.

Seeking some reprieve from her recent hardships and from her family’s addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nights’ respite inside the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals flourish. But her insistence that her son, daughter, and husband leave their devices at home proves far more fraught than she anticipated, and the lush beauty of the Botanical Garden is not the balm she hoped it would be. When her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives as she works to restore the life of her family.

Written in taut, urgent prose, Hum is a work of speculative fiction that unflinchingly explores marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities. As New York Times bestselling author Jeff VanderMeer says, “Helen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future.”]]>
262 Helen Phillips 1668008831 Saida 0 to-read 3.49 2024 Hum
author: Helen Phillips
name: Saida
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English]]> 57693584
A dark romance exposing the gaps in American identity politics, especially when exported overseas, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is at once ravishing and wry, scathing and tender. Told in alternating perspectives, Noor Naga’s experimental debut examines the ethics of fetishizing the homeland and punishing the beloved . . . and vice versa. In our globalized twenty-first-century world, what are the new faces (and races) of empire? When the revolution fails, how long can someone survive the disappointment? Who suffers and, more crucially, who gets to tell about it?]]>
186 Noor Naga 164445081X Saida 4 3.95 2022 If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English
author: Noor Naga
name: Saida
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/05/18
date added: 2025/05/18
shelves:
review:

]]>
A Country for Dying 53417864
Zahira is 40 years old, Moroccan, a prostitute, traumatized by her father's suicide decades prior, and in love with a man who no longer loves her.

Zannouba, Zahira's friend and protege, formerly known as Aziz, prepares for gender confirmation surgery and reflects on the reoccuring trauma of loss, including the loss of her pre-transition male persona.

Mojtaba is a gay Iranian revolutionary who, having fled to Paris, seeks refuge with Zahira for the month of Ramadan.

Meanwhile, Allal, Zahira's first love back in Morocco, travels to Paris to find Zahira.

Through swirling, perpendicular narratives, A Country for Dying follows the inner lives of emigrants as they contend with the space between their dreams and their realities, a schism of a postcolonial world where, as Abdellah Taïa writes, "So many people find themselves in the same situation. It is our To pay with our bodies for other people's future."]]>
101 Abdellah Taïa 1609809912 Saida 4 3.79 2015 A Country for Dying
author: Abdellah Taïa
name: Saida
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/08
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves:
review:

]]>
This Thing Between Us 56269269
“This intense cosmic horror with a touch of Mexican American folklore is incredibly creepy and moving.” —Margaret Kingsbury, BuzzFeed

It was Vera’s idea to buy the Itza. The “world’s most advanced smart speaker!” didn’t interest Thiago, but Vera thought it would be a bit of fun for them amidst all the strange occurrences happening in the condo. It made things worse. The cold spots and scratching in the walls were weird enough, but peculiar packages started showing up at the house—who ordered industrial lye? Then there was the eerie music at odd hours, Thiago waking up to Itza projecting light shows in an empty room.

It was funny and strange right up until Vera was killed, and Thiago’s world became unbearable. Pundits and politicians all looking to turn his wife’s death into a symbol for their own agendas. A barrage of texts from her well-meaning friends about letting go and moving on. Waking to the sound of Itza talking softly to someone in the living room . . .

The only thing left to do was get far away from Chicago. Away from everything and everyone. A secluded cabin in Colorado seemed like the perfect place to hole up with his crushing grief. But soon Thiago realizes there is no escape—not from his guilt, not from his simmering rage, and not from the evil hunting him, feeding on his grief, determined to make its way into this world.

A bold, original horror novel about grief, loneliness and the oppressive intimacy of technology, This Thing Between Us marks the arrival of a spectacular new talent.]]>
272 Gus Moreno 0374539235 Saida 3 3.70 2021 This Thing Between Us
author: Gus Moreno
name: Saida
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves:
review:

]]>
Tender Is the Flesh 49090884
His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.” Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing.

Then one day he’s given a a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.]]>
209 Agustina Bazterrica 1982150920 Saida 5 3.75 2017 Tender Is the Flesh
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: Saida
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/26
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves:
review:

]]>
Blessings 198563681
Obiefuna has always been the black sheep of his family—sensitive where his father, Anozie, is pragmatic, a dancer where his brother, Ekene, is a natural athlete. But when an intimate connection blossoms between Obiefuna and a boy from a nearby village, happiness is fleeting once his father catches them together and banishes him to boarding school.

Obiefuna finds and hides who he truly is as he navigates his new school’s strict hierarchy and unpredictable violence. Back home, his mother Uzoamaka must contend with the absence of her beloved son, her husband’s cryptic reasons for sending him away, and the hard truths that they’ve all been hiding from. As Nigeria teeters on the brink of criminalizing same-sex relationships, Obiefuna’s life, or the life he wants to live, becomes even further out of a reach and more dangerous than ever before.

Told from the alternating perspectives of Obiefuna and Uzoamaka, Blessings is an elegant and exquisitely moving story that asks how to live freely in a country that forbids one’s truest self, and the love that can flourish in spite of it all.]]>
288 Chukwuebuka Ibeh 0385550642 Saida 3 4.15 2024 Blessings
author: Chukwuebuka Ibeh
name: Saida
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/21
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves:
review:

]]>
Sunrise on the Reaping 214331246 When you’ve been set up to lose everything you love, what is there left to fight for?

As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes.

Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances. All he cares about is making it through the day and being with the girl he loves.

When Haymitch’s name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He’s torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 tributes: a young friend who’s nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town. As the Games begin, Haymitch understands he’s been set up to fail. But there’s something in him that wants to fight . . . and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.]]>
387 Suzanne Collins 1546171460 Saida 4 4.54 2025 Sunrise on the Reaping
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Saida
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
The End of Loneliness 35456277
A kaleidoscopic family saga told through the fractured lives of the three Moreau siblings alongside a faltering, recovering love story, The End of Loneliness is a stunning meditation on the power of our memories, of what can be lost and what can never be let go. With inimitable compassion and luminous, affecting prose, Benedict Wells contends with what it means to find a way through life, while never giving up hope you will find someone to go with you.]]>
274 Benedict Wells Saida 0 to-read 4.17 2016 The End of Loneliness
author: Benedict Wells
name: Saida
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
The Odyssey 34068470 The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty, and power; about marriage and family; about travelers, hospitality, and the yearning for home.

In this fresh, authoritative version--the first English translation of The Odyssey by a woman--this stirring tale of shipwrecks, monsters, and magic comes alive in an entirely new way. Written in iambic pentameter verse and a vivid, contemporary idiom, this engrossing translation matches the number of lines in the Greek original, thus striding at Homer's sprightly pace and singing with a voice that echoes Homer's music.

Wilson's Odyssey captures the beauty and enchantment of this ancient poem as well as the suspense and drama of its narrative. Its characters are unforgettable, from the cunning goddess Athena, whose interventions guide and protect the hero, to the awkward teenage son, Telemachus, who struggles to achieve adulthood and find his father; from the cautious, clever, and miserable Penelope, who somehow keeps clamoring suitors at bay during her husband's long absence, to the "complicated" hero himself, a man of many disguises, many tricks, and many moods, who emerges in this translation as a more fully rounded human being than ever before.

A fascinating introduction provides an informative overview of the Bronze Age milieu that produced the epic, the major themes of the poem, the controversies about its origins, and the unparalleled scope of its impact and influence. Maps drawn especially for this volume, a pronunciation glossary, and extensive notes and summaries of each book make this an Odyssey that will be treasured by a new generation of scholars, students, and general readers alike.]]>
582 Homer 0393089053 Saida 0 4.29 -700 The Odyssey
author: Homer
name: Saida
average rating: 4.29
book published: -700
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany]]> 30584
Kaplan tells the story of Jews in Germany not from the hindsight of the Holocaust, nor by focusing on the persecutors, but from the bewildered and ambiguous perspective of Jews trying to navigate their daily lives in a world that was becoming more and more insane. Answering the charge that Jews should have left earlier, Kaplan shows that far from seeming inevitable, the Holocaust was impossible to foresee precisely because Nazi repression occurred in irregular and unpredictable steps until the massive violence of Novemer 1938. Then the flow of emigration turned into a torrent, only to be stopped by the war. By that time Jews had been evicted from their homes, robbed of their possessions and their livelihoods, shunned by their former friends, persecuted by their neighbors, and driven into forced labor. For those trapped in Germany, mere survival became a nightmare of increasingly desperate options. Many took their own lives to retain at least some dignity in death; others went
underground and endured the fears of nightly bombings and the even greater terror of being discovered by the Nazis. Most were murdered. All were pressed to the limit of human endurance and human loneliness.

Focusing on the fate of families and particularly women's experience, Between Dignity and Despair takes us into the neighborhoods, into the kitchens, shops, and schools, to give us the shape and texture, the very feel of what it was like to be a Jew in Nazi Germany.]]>
304 Marion A. Kaplan 0195130928 Saida 0 4.21 1998 Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany
author: Marion A. Kaplan
name: Saida
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/28
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves:
review:

]]>
Ordinary Human Failings 62601701
FINALIST FOR THE FALLON BOOK CLUB SELECTION

When we look beyond the headlines, everyone has a story to tell

It's 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves has it all: a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the "peasants" - ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star looks set to rise when he stumbles across a scoop: a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents loved across the neighbourhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and 'bad apples': the Greens.

At their heart sits Carmel: beautiful, otherworldly, broken, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life - and love - got in her way. Crushed by failure and surrounded by disappointment, there's nowhere for her to go and no chance of escape. Now, with the police closing in on a suspect and the tabloids hunting their monster, she must confront the secrets and silences that have trapped her family for so many generations.]]>
218 Megan Nolan 1787332500 Saida 0 to-read 3.72 2023 Ordinary Human Failings
author: Megan Nolan
name: Saida
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
The Favorites 211399784
Until a shocking incident at the Olympic Games brings their partnership to a sudden end.

As the ten-year anniversary of their final skate approaches, an unauthorized documentary reignites the public fascination with Shaw and Rocha, claiming to uncover the “real story” through interviews with their closest friends and fiercest rivals. Kat wants nothing to do with the documentary, but she can’t stand the thought of someone else defining her legacy. So, after a decade of silence, she’s telling her story: from the childhood tragedies that created her all-consuming bond with Heath to the clash of desires that tore them apart. Sensational rumors have haunted their every step for years, but the truth may be even more shocking than the headlines.]]>
437 Layne Fargo 0593732049 Saida 0 to-read 4.11 2025 The Favorites
author: Layne Fargo
name: Saida
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
Martyr! 139400713 A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.]]>
331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Saida 0 to-read 4.21 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Saida
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
The Lamb 216867498
Margot and Mama have lived by the forest since Margot can remember. When Margot isn't at school, they spend quiet days together in their cottage, waiting for strangers to knock on their door. Strays, Mama calls them. Mama loves the strays. She feeds them wine, keeps them warm. Then she satisfies her burning appetite by picking apart their bodies.

But Mama's want is stronger than her hunger sometimes, and when a white-toothed stray named Eden turns up in the heart of a snowstorm, little Margot must confront the shifting dynamics of her family, untangle her own desires and make a bid for freedom.

With this tender coming-of-age tale, debut novelist Lucy Rose explores how women swallow their anger, desire and animal instincts - and wrings the relationship between mother and daughter until blood drips from it.]]>
336 Lucy Rose 1399619713 Saida 0 to-read 3.85 2025 The Lamb
author: Lucy Rose
name: Saida
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
Chain Gang All Stars 202468406
Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private prison industry. It's the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.

In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE's corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar's path have devastating consequences.

Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system's unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means.]]>
411 Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah 0593469313 Saida 3 4.21 2023 Chain Gang All Stars
author: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
name: Saida
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/02
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves:
review:

]]>
Piranesi 56268907
There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.]]>
245 Susanna Clarke 1635577802 Saida 5 4.25 2020 Piranesi
author: Susanna Clarke
name: Saida
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/29
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves:
review:

]]>
Purple Hibiscus 126381
When Nigeria begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili’s father sends her and her brother away to stay with their aunt, a University professor, whose house is noisy and full of laughter. There, Kambili and her brother discover a life and love beyond the confines of their father’s authority. The visit will lift the silence from their world and, in time, give rise to devotion and defiance that reveal themselves in profound and unexpected ways.

This is a book about the promise of freedom; about the blurred lines between childhood and adulthood; between love and hatred, between the old gods and the new.]]>
336 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Saida 4 4.14 2003 Purple Hibiscus
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Saida
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/25
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves:
review:

]]>
Gimmicks and Glamour 75526075
To everyone else she’s just a seventeen-year-old party girl and problem senior at Hackley High School. She has always felt alone, and not just because she’s biracial and openly bisexual. Ashly sees faeries all around her, all the time. She has learned to hide her Sight, but that doesn’t change the fact that she is constantly taking the blame for the havoc that the faeries wreak. The only person who knows about Ashly’s ability is her eccentric, yet level-headed best friend, Caris, who might be playing along while also playing with Ashly’s feelings.

As Ashly speeds toward graduation with few future prospects on the horizon, she must protect the classmates she claims to hate from an evil that no one else sees.

This is an accessible story with an interesting premise: The fantasy metaphor for Ashly’s adolescent alienation and despair works well and livens up the plot, especially when a revelation draws Ashly into the throes of a faerie war as well as a rewarding queer romance. A relatable fantasy weaving in real-life issues." - Kirkus Review]]>
216 Lauren Melissa Ellzey 1636794017 Saida 2 "Gimmicks and Glamour”‘s story premise had a lot of potential, and the author's writing style was engaging. I appreciated the unique blend of mystery and romance, which kept me turning the pages.

What I loved most about the novel was its focus on the main character Ashly’s life and her character. The focus of the novel wasn’t the faerie world or her high school life but rather the main character and her best friend however, when the fae world was described, the author's descriptive prose brought the opulent settings to life, and certain scenes were truly captivating. The chemistry between the main characters was palpable, and their dynamic provided some of the book's strongest moments.

My only critique is that the twists and turns sometimes felt forced, and some of the character decisions were a bit hard to believe. While the book did deliver on the promised glamour, there were moments when it seemed a bit overdone, making it difficult to fully connect with the characters.

In the end, "Gimmicks and Glamour" is a book that offers the cutest f/f, friends-to-lovers romance and is an enjoyable read for those who appreciate a YA blend of mystery, romance, and magic though some aspects might leave older readers wishing for a bit more subtlety and depth. Overall, the novel has such an autumn-y feel so I recommend checking it out then! ]]>
3.92 Gimmicks and Glamour
author: Lauren Melissa Ellzey
name: Saida
average rating: 3.92
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2023/08/19
date added: 2025/01/21
shelves:
review:

"Gimmicks and Glamour”‘s story premise had a lot of potential, and the author's writing style was engaging. I appreciated the unique blend of mystery and romance, which kept me turning the pages.

What I loved most about the novel was its focus on the main character Ashly’s life and her character. The focus of the novel wasn’t the faerie world or her high school life but rather the main character and her best friend however, when the fae world was described, the author's descriptive prose brought the opulent settings to life, and certain scenes were truly captivating. The chemistry between the main characters was palpable, and their dynamic provided some of the book's strongest moments.

My only critique is that the twists and turns sometimes felt forced, and some of the character decisions were a bit hard to believe. While the book did deliver on the promised glamour, there were moments when it seemed a bit overdone, making it difficult to fully connect with the characters.

In the end, "Gimmicks and Glamour" is a book that offers the cutest f/f, friends-to-lovers romance and is an enjoyable read for those who appreciate a YA blend of mystery, romance, and magic though some aspects might leave older readers wishing for a bit more subtlety and depth. Overall, the novel has such an autumn-y feel so I recommend checking it out then!
]]>
The Lookback Window 62919373 A fearless debut novel of resilience, transcendence, and the elusive promise of justice.

Growing up in suburban New York, Dylan lived through the unfathomable: three years as a victim of sex trafficking at the hands of Vincent, a troubled young man who promised to marry Dylan when he turned eighteen. Years later—long after a police investigation that went nowhere, and after the statute of limitations for the crimes perpetrated against him have run out—the long shadow of Dylan’s trauma still looms over the fragile life in the city he’s managed to build with his fiancé, Moans, who knows little of Dylan’s past. His continued existence depends upon an all-important mantra: To survive, you live through it, but never look back.

Then a groundbreaking new law—the Child Victims Act—opens a new way forward: a one-year window during which Dylan can sue his abusers. But for someone who was trafficked as a child, does money represent justice—does his pain have a price? As Dylan is forced to look back at what happened to him and try to make sense of his past, he begins to explore a drug and sex-fueled world of bathhouses, clubs, and strangers’ apartments, only to emerge, barely alive, with a new clarity of purpose: a righteous determination to gaze, unflinching, upon the brutal men whose faces have haunted him for a decade, and to extract justice on his own terms.

By turns harrowing, lyrical, and beautiful, Hertz’s debut offers a startling glimpse at the unraveling of trauma—and the light that peeks, faintly, and often in surprising ways, from the other side of the window.]]>
288 Kyle Dillon Hertz 1668005875 Saida 3 3.71 2023 The Lookback Window
author: Kyle Dillon Hertz
name: Saida
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/30
date added: 2025/01/21
shelves:
review:

]]>
The Kite Runner 12532265
Since its publication in 2003, The Kite Runner has sold eight million copies worldwide. Through Khaled Hosseini's brilliant writing, a previously unknown part of the world was brought to life.]]>
342 Khaled Hosseini 140882485X Saida 4 4.41 2003 The Kite Runner
author: Khaled Hosseini
name: Saida
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/21
date added: 2025/01/21
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917–2017]]> 41812831 In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, former mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to transform Palestine into a Jewish state, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “In the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.

Accepted interpretations of the conflict tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same land. Drawing on archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—judges, scholars, diplomats, and writers—who were present at key events, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine instead shows this war has always been colonial in nature, waged against the native population first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. Khalidi highlights crucial episodes in this long colonial campaign, from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from the war of 1967 to Israel’s recent assaults on Gaza.

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In this lively, original, and important history, Khalidi points to the resistance of Palestinians in the face of the heaviest odds and offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.

"This is the first true people's history of the hundred-year struggle of the Palestine people, a beautifully written text and a call for justice and self-determination." — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States]]>
319 Rashid Khalidi 1627798552 Saida 5 4.50 2020 The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917–2017
author: Rashid Khalidi
name: Saida
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves:
review:

]]>
Thirst for Salt 61340225 “A love affair so richly and attentively imagined it carries the grace and gravity of memory itself.” ―Leslie Jamison It’s hard to remember now that I was once that girl, lying in the sand in my red swimsuit and swimming late into the day. Sharkbait , he called me.

It’s in the water where she first sees him: a local man almost twenty years her senior. Adrift in the summer after finishing college, a young woman is on holiday with her mother in an isolated Australian coastal town. Finding herself pulled to Jude, the man in the water, she begins losing herself in the simple, seductive rhythms of his everyday life. As their relationship deepens, life at Sailors Beach offers her the stability she has been craving as the daughter of two drifters―a loving but impulsive mother and an itinerant father. But the arrival of Maeve, a friend from Jude’s past, threatens to rock their fragile, newfound intimacy. And when she witnesses something she doesn’t fully understand, she finds herself questioning everything―about Jude, about herself, about the life she has and the one she wants. A magnetic and unforgettable story of desire and its complexities, and a powerful reckoning with memory, loss, and longing, Madelaine Lucas’s debut novel, Thirst for Salt , reveals with stunning, sensual immediacy the way the past can hold us in its thrall, shaping who we are and what we love.]]>
272 Madelaine Lucas 1953534651 Saida 2 3.81 2023 Thirst for Salt
author: Madelaine Lucas
name: Saida
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/19
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves:
review:

]]>
In Memoriam 179546799
It’s 1914, and World War I is ceaselessly churning through thousands of young men on both sides of the fight. The violence of the front feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. News of the heroic deaths of their friends only makes the war more exciting.
Gaunt, half German, is busy fighting his own private battle—an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the glamorous, charming Ellwood—without a clue that Ellwood is pining for him in return. When Gaunt's family asks him to enlist to forestall the anti-German sentiment they face, Gaunt does so immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood. To Gaunt's horror, Ellwood rushes to join him at the front, and the rest of their classmates soon follow. Now death surrounds them in all its grim reality, often inches away, and no one knows who will be next.
An epic tale of both the devastating tragedies of war and the forbidden romance that blooms in its grip, In Memoriam is a breathtaking debut.]]>
400 Alice Winn 0593467841 Saida 5 4.54 2023 In Memoriam
author: Alice Winn
name: Saida
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/04
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves:
review:

]]>
Our Wives Under the Sea 58724816 Leah is changed. A marine biologist, she left for a routine expedition months earlier, only this time her submarine sank to the sea floor. When she finally surfaces and returns home, her wife, Miri, knows that something is wrong. Barely eating and lost in her thoughts, Leah rotates between rooms in their apartment, running the taps morning and night. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was the crew was supposed to be studying before they were stranded, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto dry land and into their home. As Miri searches for answers, desperate to understand what happened below the water, she must face the possibility that the woman she loves is slipping from her grasp.

By turns elegiac and furious, wry and heartbreaking, Our Wives Under the Sea is an exploration of the unknowable depths within each of us and the love that compels us, nevertheless, toward one another. Fathomlessly inventive and original, Julia Armfield’s debut novel is a portrait of marriage as we’ve never seen it before.]]>
228 Julia Armfield 1250229898 Saida 3 3.68 2022 Our Wives Under the Sea
author: Julia Armfield
name: Saida
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/27
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves:
review:

]]>
Conversations with Friends 37506350
Written with gemlike precision and marked by a sly sense of humor, Conversations with Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth, and the messy edges of female friendship.]]>
307 Sally Rooney 0451499069 Saida 3 3.77 2017 Conversations with Friends
author: Sally Rooney
name: Saida
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/27
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves:
review:

]]>
An Excellent Host 212436950
Somewhere in Brooklyn, a feast awaits its guests, a man cannot believe his great good luck, and ancient gods get ready to receive their due in this horror-fantasy updating of Greek myths.

An exclusive paperback for Indie Bookstore Day, featuring a new story from Chelsea G. Summers, the bestselling author of A Certain Hunger. Signed by the author.]]>
69 Chelsea G. Summers 196188416X Saida 1 3.99 2024 An Excellent Host
author: Chelsea G. Summers
name: Saida
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 1
read at: 2024/06/12
date added: 2024/12/25
shelves:
review:

]]>
Monstrilio 196842128
A thought-provoking meditation on grief, acceptance, and the monstrous sides of love and loyalty, Gerardo Sámano Córdova blends bold imagination and evocative prose with deep emotional rigor. Told in four acts that span the globe from Brooklyn to Berlin, Monstrilio offers, with uncanny clarity, a cathartic and precise portrait of being human.]]>
336 Gerardo Sámano Córdova 1638931607 Saida 4 4.11 2023 Monstrilio
author: Gerardo Sámano Córdova
name: Saida
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/24
date added: 2024/12/24
shelves:
review:

]]>
Hamnet 43890641 Hamnet is a luminous portrait of a marriage, at its heart the loss of a beloved child.

Warwickshire in the 1580s. Agnes is a woman as feared as she is sought after for her unusual gifts. She settles with her husband in Henley street, Stratford, and has three children: a daughter, Susanna, and then twins, Hamnet and Judith. The boy, Hamnet, dies in 1596, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the husband writes a play called Hamlet.

Award-winning author Maggie O'Farrell's new novel breathes full-blooded life into the story of a loss usually consigned to literary footnotes, and provides an unforgettable vindication of Agnes, a woman intriguingly absent from history.

A New York Times Notable Book (2020), Best Book of 2020: Guardian, Financial Times, Literary Hub, and NPR.]]>
372 Maggie O'Farrell 1472223799 Saida 0 to-read 4.16 2020 Hamnet
author: Maggie O'Farrell
name: Saida
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[A Madness Most Discreet (A Midsummer Story)]]> 53435731 When a struggling writer finds his muse in the form of a high-paid, mysterious escort, madness soon follows…

Michael D'Agostino, a bestselling mystery author, is suffering from writer’s block when he meets Arden Evans, a beguiling male escort and catalog model who is attempting to write a memoir of his own.

Captivated by the young man, Michael finds Arden to be refreshingly honest and authentic. When Arden asks that they “keep it simple” with a no-strings-attached relationship, Michael readily agrees. Their arrangement becomes increasingly complicated, however, as Michael begins to want more from his enchanting lover.

And then there is the matter of Arden’s finances. The young man is drowning in debt, but is so fiercely private and prideful that he refuses to discuss it. This same debt is what obligates Arden to his wealthy benefactor, much to Michael’s suspicion and vexation.

Arden isn’t used to being loved and cared for, doesn’t understand that emotional intimacy isn’t just an obligation for Michael, but a deep desire. Michael wants their love affair to last, but how do you hold onto a man whose gaze is forever fixed on the horizon?

A MADNESS MOST DISCREET is a contemporary M/M romance centered around class differences and set in New York City. Both characters live a fairly libertine lifestyle that involves sharing and exhibitionism. There is no cheating in the traditional sense, but Arden is sex worker throughout. Trigger warning for sexual assault. The story ends with an HEA.]]>
286 Laura Lascarso Saida 0 3.67 2020 A Madness Most Discreet (A Midsummer Story)
author: Laura Lascarso
name: Saida
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[These Violent Delights (These Violent Delights, #1)]]> 50892212
A blood feud between two gangs runs the streets red, leaving the city helpless in the grip of chaos. At the heart of it all is eighteen-year-old Juliette Cai, a former flapper who has returned to assume her role as the proud heir of the Scarlet Gang—a network of criminals far above the law. Their only rivals in power are the White Flowers, who have fought the Scarlets for generations. And behind every move is their heir, Roma Montagov, Juliette’s first love…and first betrayal.

But when gangsters on both sides show signs of instability culminating in clawing their own throats out, the people start to whisper. Of a contagion, a madness. Of a monster in the shadows. As the deaths stack up, Juliette and Roma must set their guns—and grudges—aside and work together, for if they can’t stop this mayhem, then there will be no city left for either to rule.

Perfect for fans of The Last Magician and Descendant of the Crane, this heart-stopping debut is an imaginative Romeo and Juliet retelling set in 1920s Shanghai, with rival gangs and a monster in the depths of the Huangpu River.]]>
449 Chloe Gong 1534457690 Saida 0 3.81 2020 These Violent Delights (These Violent Delights, #1)
author: Chloe Gong
name: Saida
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
Red, White & Royal Blue 41150487
As President Claremont kicks off her reelection bid, Alex finds himself hurtling into a secret relationship with Henry that could derail the campaign and upend two nations. What is worth the sacrifice? How do you do all the good you can do? And, most importantly, how will history remember you?]]>
448 Casey McQuiston 1250316774 Saida 0 4.06 2019 Red, White & Royal Blue
author: Casey McQuiston
name: Saida
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
Circe 35959740
Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts, and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus.

But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from or with the mortals she has come to love.]]>
393 Madeline Miller 0316556343 Saida 0 4.22 2018 Circe
author: Madeline Miller
name: Saida
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
Tin Man 31117613
Ellis and Michael are twelve when they first become friends, and for a long time it is just the two of them, cycling the streets of Oxford, teaching themselves how to swim, discovering poetry, and dodging the fists of an overbearing father. And then one day this closest of friendships grows into something more.

But then we fast forward a decade or so, to find that Ellis is married to Annie, and Michael is nowhere in sight. Which leads to the question, what happened in the years between?

This is almost a love story. But it's not as simple as that.]]>
213 Sarah Winman 0755390962 Saida 0 3.94 2017 Tin Man
author: Sarah Winman
name: Saida
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
If We Were Villains 30319086
As one of seven young actors studying Shakespeare at an elite arts college, Oliver and his friends play the same roles onstage and off: hero, villain, tyrant, temptress, ingenue, extra. But when the casting changes, and the secondary characters usurp the stars, the plays spill dangerously over into life, and one of them is found dead. The rest face their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, and themselves, that they are blameless.]]>
354 M.L. Rio 125009528X Saida 0 4.10 2017 If We Were Villains
author: M.L. Rio
name: Saida
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
A Little Life 22822858
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.]]>
720 Hanya Yanagihara 0385539258 Saida 0 4.27 2015 A Little Life
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: Saida
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Crooked Kingdom (Six of Crows, #2)]]> 22299763
Kaz Brekker and his crew of deadly outcasts have just pulled off a heist so daring even they didn't think they'd survive. But instead of divvying up a fat reward, they're right back to fighting for their lives.

Double-crossed and badly weakened, the crew is low on resources, allies, and hope. As powerful forces from around the world descend on Ketterdam to root out the secrets of the dangerous drug known as jurda parem, old rivals and new enemies emerge to challenge Kaz's cunning and test the team's fragile loyalties.

A war will be waged on the city's dark and twisting streets - a battle for revenge and redemption that will decide the fate of the Grisha world.]]>
561 Leigh Bardugo Saida 0 4.58 2016 Crooked Kingdom (Six of Crows, #2)
author: Leigh Bardugo
name: Saida
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1)]]> 23437156 Alternate cover of ISBN 9781627792127

Ketterdam: a bustling hub of international trade where anything can be had for the right price—and no one knows that better than criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker. Kaz is offered a chance at a deadly heist that could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. But he can’t pull it off alone...

A convict with a thirst for revenge

A sharpshooter who can’t walk away from a wager

A runaway with a privileged past

A spy known as the Wraith

A Heartrender using her magic to survive the slums

A thief with a gift for unlikely escapes

Six dangerous outcasts. One impossible heist. Kaz’s crew is the only thing that might stand between the world and destruction—if they don’t kill each other first.]]>
480 Leigh Bardugo 1627792120 Saida 0 4.47 2015 Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1)
author: Leigh Bardugo
name: Saida
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Wrath and the Dawn (The Wrath and the Dawn, #1)]]> 18798983 One Life to One Dawn.

In a land ruled by a murderous boy-king, each dawn brings heartache to a new family. Khalid, the eighteen-year-old Caliph of Khorasan, is a monster. Each night he takes a new bride only to have a silk cord wrapped around her throat come morning. When sixteen-year-old Shahrzad's dearest friend falls victim to Khalid, Shahrzad vows vengeance and volunteers to be his next bride. Shahrzad is determined not only to stay alive, but to end the caliph's reign of terror once and for all.

Night after night, Shahrzad beguiles Khalid, weaving stories that enchant, ensuring her survival, though she knows each dawn could be her last. But something she never expected begins to happen: Khalid is nothing like what she'd imagined him to be. This monster is a boy with a tormented heart. Incredibly, Shahrzad finds herself falling in love. How is this possible? It's an unforgivable betrayal. Still, Shahrzad has come to understand all is not as it seems in this palace of marble and stone. She resolves to uncover whatever secrets lurk and, despite her love, be ready to take Khalid's life as retribution for the many lives he's stolen. Can their love survive this world of stories and secrets?]]>
416 Renée Ahdieh 0399171614 Saida 0 4.05 2015 The Wrath and the Dawn (The Wrath and the Dawn, #1)
author: Renée Ahdieh
name: Saida
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Foxhole Court (All for the Game, #1)]]> 17259690
Signing a contract with the PSU Foxes is the last thing a guy like Neil should do. The team is high profile and he doesn't need sports crews broadcasting pictures of his face around the nation. His lies will hold up only so long under this kind of scrutiny and the truth will get him killed.

But Neil's not the only one with secrets on the team. One of Neil's new teammates is a friend from his old life, and Neil can't walk away from him a second time. Neil has survived the last eight years by running. Maybe he's finally found someone and something worth fighting for.]]>
237 Nora Sakavic 1301529044 Saida 0 4.02 2013 The Foxhole Court (All for the Game, #1)
author: Nora Sakavic
name: Saida
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1)]]> 50659467
At least, he’s not a beast all the time.

As she adapts to her new home, her feelings for the faerie, Tamlin, transform from icy hostility into a fiery passion that burns through every lie she’s been told about the beautiful, dangerous world of the Fae. But something is not right in the faerie lands. An ancient, wicked shadow is growing, and Feyre must find a way to stop it, or doom Tamlin—and his world—forever.

From bestselling author Sarah J. Maas comes a seductive, breathtaking book that blends romance, adventure, and faerie lore into an unforgettable read.]]>
419 Sarah J. Maas 1635575567 Saida 0 4.15 2015 A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1)
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Saida
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Aristotle and Dante, #1)]]> 12000020
But against all odds, when Ari and Dante meet, they develop a special bond that will teach them the most important truths of their lives, and help define the people they want to be. But there are big hurdles in their way, and only by believing in each other—and the power of their friendship—can Ari and Dante emerge stronger on the other side.]]>
390 Benjamin Alire Sáenz 1442408928 Saida 0 4.29 2012 Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Aristotle and Dante, #1)
author: Benjamin Alire Sáenz
name: Saida
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
Legend (Legend, #1) 29863662 Librarian's Note: this is an alternate cover edition for ASIN B0052RDJAO.

What was once the western United States is now home to the Republic, a nation perpetually at war with its neighbors.

Born into an elite family in one of the Republic's wealthiest districts, fifteen-year-old June is a prodigy being groomed for success in the Republic's highest military circles.

Born into the slums, fifteen-year-old Day is the country's most wanted criminal. But his motives may not be as malicious as they seem.

From very different worlds, June and Day have no reason to cross paths - until the day June's brother, Metias, is murdered and Day becomes the prime suspect.
Caught in the ultimate game of cat and mouse, Day is in a race for his family's survival, while June seeks to avenge Metias's death. But in a shocking turn of events, the two uncover the truth of what has really brought them together, and the sinister lengths their country will go to keep its secrets.]]>
318 Marie Lu Saida 0 4.12 2011 Legend (Legend, #1)
author: Marie Lu
name: Saida
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Twilight (The Twilight Saga, #1)]]> 41865
First, Edward was a vampire.

Second, there was a part of him - and I didn't know how dominant that part might be - that thirsted for my blood.

And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.

Deeply seductive and extraordinarily suspenseful, Twilight is a love story with bite.]]>
498 Stephenie Meyer 0316015849 Saida 0 3.66 2005 Twilight (The Twilight Saga, #1)
author: Stephenie Meyer
name: Saida
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[New Moon (The Twilight Saga, #2)]]> 49041 There is an alternate cover edition for ISBN13 9780316160193 here.

I knew we were both in mortal danger. Still, in that instant, I felt well. Whole. I could feel my heart racing in my chest, the blood pulsing hot and fast through my veins again. My lungs filled deep with the sweet scent that came off his skin. It was like there had never been any hole in my chest. I was perfect - not healed, but as if there had never been a wound in the first place.

I FELT LIKE I WAS TRAPPED IN ONE OF THOSE TERRIFYING NIGHTMARES, the one where you have to run, run till your lungs burst, but you can't make your body move fast enough.... But this was no dream, and, unlike the nightmare, I wasn't running for my life; I was racing to save something infinitely more precious. My own life meant little to me today.

FOR BELLA SWAN THERE IS ONE THING more important than life itself: Edward Cullen. But being in love with a vampire is even more dangerous than Bella could ever have imagined. Edward has already rescued Bella from the clutches of one evil vampire, but now, as their daring relationship threatens all that is near and dear to them, they realize their troubles may be just beginning....

LEGIONS OF READERS ENTRANCED BY THE New York Times bestseller Twilight are hungry for the continuing story of star-crossed lovers Bell and Edward. In New Moon, Stephanie Meyer delivers another irresistible combination of romance and suspense with a supernatural spin. passionate, riveting, and full of surprising twists and turns, this vampire love saga is well on its way to literary immortality.]]>
563 Stephenie Meyer 0316160199 Saida 0 3.61 2006 New Moon (The Twilight Saga, #2)
author: Stephenie Meyer
name: Saida
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Breaking Dawn (The Twilight Saga, #4)]]> 1162543 "Don't be afraid," I murmured. "We belong together."
I was abruptly overwhelmed by the truth of my own words.
This moment was so perfect, so right, there was no way to doubt it.
His arms wrapped around me,
holding me against him....
It felt like every nerve ending in my body was a live wire.
"Forever," he agreed.

WHEN YOU LOVED THE ONE WHO WAS KILLING YOU, IT LEFT YOU NO OPTIONS. How could you run, how could you fight, when doing so would hurt that beloved one? If your life was all you had to give, how could you not give it? If it was someone you truly loved?

TO BE IRREVOCABLY IN LOVE WITH A VAMPIRE is both fantasy and nightmare woven into a dangerously heightened reality for Bella Swan. Pulled in one direction by her intense passion for Edward Cullen, and in another by her profound connection to werewolf Jacob Black, a tumultuous year of temptation, loss, and strife have led her to the ultimate turning point. Her imminent choice to either join the dark but seductive world of immortals or to pursue a fully human life has become the thread from which the fates of two tribes hangs.

NOW THAT BELLA HAS MADE HER DECISION, a startling chain of unprecedented events is about to unfold with potentially devastating, and unfathomable, consequences. Just when the frayed strands of Bella's life - first discovered in Twilight, then scattered and torn in New Moon and Eclipse - seem ready to heal and knit together, could they be destroyed... forever?

THE ASTONISHING, BREATHLESSLY anticipated conclusion to the Twilight Saga, Breaking Dawn illuminates the secrets and mysteries of this spellbinding romantic epic that has entranced millions.]]>
756 Stephenie Meyer 031606792X Saida 0 3.75 2008 Breaking Dawn (The Twilight Saga, #4)
author: Stephenie Meyer
name: Saida
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Eclipse (The Twilight Saga, #3)]]> 428263 "BELLA?"
Edward's soft voice came from behind me. I turned to see him spring lightly up the porch steps, his hair windblown from running. He pulled me into his arms at once, just like he had in the parking lot, and kissed me again.
This kiss frightened me. There was too much tension, too strong an edge to the way his lips crushed mine - like he was afraid we had only so much time left to us.

As Seattle is ravaged by a string of mysterious killings and a malicious vampire continues her quest for revenge, Bella once again finds herself surrounded by danger. In the midst of it all, she is forced to choose between her love for Edward and her friendship with Jacob - knowing that her decision has the potential to ignite the ageless struggle between vampire and werewolf. With her graduation quickly approaching, Bella has one more decision to make: life or death. But which is which?

READERS CAPTIVATED BY Twilight AND New Moon will eagerly devour Eclipse, the much-anticipated third book in Stephenie Meyer's riveting vampire love saga.]]>
629 Stephenie Meyer 0316160202 Saida 0 3.73 2007 Eclipse (The Twilight Saga, #3)
author: Stephenie Meyer
name: Saida
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Perks of Being a Wallflower]]> 22628 offers a unique perspective. But there comes a time to see
what it looks like from the dance floor.

This haunting novel about the dilemma of passivity vs. passion marks the stunning debut of a provocative new voice in contemporary fiction: The Perks of Being A WALLFLOWER

This is the story of what it's like to grow up in high school. More intimate than a diary, Charlie's letters are singular and unique, hilarious and devastating. We may not know where he lives. We may not know to whom he is writing. All we know is the world he shares. Caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it puts him on a strange course through uncharted territory. The world of first dates and mixed tapes, family dramas and new friends. The world of sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, when all one requires is that the perfect song on that perfect drive to feel infinite.

Through Charlie, Stephen Chbosky has created a deeply affecting coming-of-age story, a powerful novel that will spirit you back to those wild and poignant roller coaster days known as growing up.

(back cover)]]>
213 Stephen Chbosky Saida 0 4.24 1999 The Perks of Being a Wallflower
author: Stephen Chbosky
name: Saida
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
Autobiography of Red 61049 Autobiography of Red, a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present.

Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent. By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is.

"A profound love story . . . sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender." -- The New York Times Book Review

"A deeply odd and immensely engaging book. . . . [Carson] exposes with passionate force the mythic underlying the explosive everyday."  -- The Village Voice

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

National book Critics Circle Award Finalist]]>
160 Anne Carson 037570129X Saida 0 4.27 1998 Autobiography of Red
author: Anne Carson
name: Saida
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
Of Mice and Men 890 “I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that's why.”

They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation. Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. But George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own.

While the powerlessness of the laboring class is a recurring theme in Steinbeck's work of the late 1930s, he narrowed his focus when composing Of Mice and Men, creating an intimate portrait of two men facing a world marked by petty tyranny, misunderstanding, jealousy, and callousness. But though the scope is narrow, the theme is universal: a friendship and a shared dream that makes an individual's existence meaningful.

A unique perspective on life's hardships, this story has achieved the status of timeless classic due to its remarkable success as a novel, a Broadway play, and three acclaimed films.]]>
107 John Steinbeck 0142000671 Saida 0 3.88 1937 Of Mice and Men
author: John Steinbeck
name: Saida
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1937
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
I Who Have Never Known Men 60811826 Deep underground, forty women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.

As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl—the fortieth prisoner—sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.

Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman’s modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.]]>
184 Jacqueline Harpman 1945492600 Saida 5 Amaaaaaazing 4.09 1995 I Who Have Never Known Men
author: Jacqueline Harpman
name: Saida
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/19
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves:
review:
Amaaaaaazing
]]>
Hungerstone 212342605 Hungerstone is a thrillingly seductive sapphic romance for fans of S.T. Gibson’s A Dowry of Blood and Emilia Hart’s Weyward.

For what do you hunger, Lenore?

Lenore is the wife of steel magnate Henry, but ten years into their marriage, the relationship has soured and no child has arrived to fill the distance growing between them. Henry's ambitions take them out of London and to the imposing Nethershaw manor in the countryside, where Henry aims to host a hunt with society’s finest. Lenore keeps a terrible secret from the last time her husband hunted, and though they never speak of it, it haunts their marriage to this day.

The preparations for the event take a turn when a carriage accident near their remote home brings the mysterious Carmilla into Lenore's life. Carmilla who is weak and pale during the day but vibrant at night; Carmilla who stirs up a hunger deep within Lenore. Soon girls from local villages begin to fall sick before being consumed by a bloody hunger.

Torn between regaining her husband's affection and Carmilla's ever-growing presence, Lenore begins to unravel her past and in doing so, uncovers a darkness in her household that will place her at terrible risk . . .

Set against the violent wilderness of the moors and the uncontrolled appetite of the industrial revolution, Hungerstone is a compulsive feminist reworking of Carmilla, the book that inspired Dracula: a captivating story of appetite and desire.]]>
336 Kat Dunn 1638932166 Saida 0 to-read 3.96 2025 Hungerstone
author: Kat Dunn
name: Saida
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism]]> 12634991 432 Phyllis Goldstein 0981954383 Saida 0 4.29 2011 A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism
author: Phyllis Goldstein
name: Saida
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/16
date added: 2024/12/16
shelves:
review:

]]>
I Will Greet the Sun Again 62802733 A searing, heartbreaking debut about the powerful bonds that make and break an Iranian-American family

Three young brothers leave Los Angeles in the dead of night for Iran, taken by their father from their mother to a country and an ancestral home they barely recognize. They return to the Valley months later, spit back into American life and changed in awful and inexorable ways. Under the annihilating light of the California sun, our protagonist, the youngest brother, tries to piece together a childhood shattered by his father's abuse, a queer adolescence marked by a shy, secret love affair with a boy he meets on the basketball court, and his suddenly-hostile status as a Muslim living under the shadow of 9/11.

'I WILL GREET THE SUN AGAIN is exquisite, heart-breaking, incredibly beautiful. The whole narrative thrums with a bright, warm longing. You can feel the sunshine of LA and Iran, the rhythm of Khashayar J Khabushani's voice. This is a novel to return to again and again.' Caleb Azumah Nelson, award-winning, bestselling author of OPEN WATER]]>
240 Khashayar J. Khabushani 0593243307 Saida 0 to-read 3.84 2023 I Will Greet the Sun Again
author: Khashayar J. Khabushani
name: Saida
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
Sunburn 75715117 Selected as an Evening Standard 'one to watch in 2023'

It's the early 1990s, and in the Irish village of Crossmore, Lucy feels out of place. Despite her fierce friendships, she's always felt this way, and the conventional path of marriage and motherhood doesn't appeal to her at all. Not even with handsome and doting Martin, her closest childhood friend.

Lucy begins to make sense of herself during a long hot summer, when a spark with her school friend Susannah escalates to an all-consuming infatuation, and, very quickly, to a desperate and devastating love.

Fearful of rejection from her small and conservative community, Lucy begins living a double life, hiding the most honest parts of herself in stolen moments with Susannah.

But with the end of school and the opportunity to leave Crossmore looming, Lucy must choose between two places, two people and two futures, each as terrifying as the other. But only one can offer her real happiness.

Sunburn is an astute and tender portrayal of first love, adolescent anxiety and the realities of growing up in a small town where tradition holds people tightly in its grasp.]]>
288 Chloe Michelle Howarth 0857308416 Saida 4 4.32 2023 Sunburn
author: Chloe Michelle Howarth
name: Saida
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/27
date added: 2024/10/27
shelves:
review:

]]>
Minor Detail 52974301 Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba—the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people—and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand.

Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder, and becomes fascinated to the point of obsession, not only because of the nature of the crime, but because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born. Adania Shibli masterfully overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past.]]>
105 Adania Shibli 0811229076 Saida 5 4.22 2017 Minor Detail
author: Adania Shibli
name: Saida
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/01
date added: 2024/10/01
shelves:
review:

]]>
Normal People 41057294
A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years in college, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. Then, as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.

Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship.]]>
273 Sally Rooney 1984822179 Saida 5 3.81 2018 Normal People
author: Sally Rooney
name: Saida
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/15
date added: 2024/08/15
shelves:
review:

]]>
Open Water 53414230
At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, Caleb Azumah Nelson has written the most essential British debut of recent years.]]>
145 Caleb Azumah Nelson 0241448778 Saida 5 4.02 2021 Open Water
author: Caleb Azumah Nelson
name: Saida
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/23
date added: 2024/07/23
shelves:
review:

]]>
Everything I Know About Love 46041465
When it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming an adult, journalist and former Sunday Times columnist Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all. In her memoir, she vividly recounts falling in love, finding a job, getting drunk, getting dumped, realizing that Ivan from the corner shop might just be the only reliable man in her life, and that absolutely no one can ever compare to her best girlfriends. Everything I Know About Love is about bad dates, good friends and—above all else— realizing that you are enough.

Glittering with wit and insight, heart and humor, Dolly Alderton’s unforgettable debut weaves together personal stories, satirical observations, a series of lists, recipes, and other vignettes that will strike a chord of recognition with women of every age—making you want to pick up the phone and tell your best friends all about it. Like Bridget Jones’ Diary but all true, Everything I Know About Love is about the struggles of early adulthood in all its terrifying and hopeful uncertainty.]]>
368 Dolly Alderton 0062968785 Saida 4 3.97 2018 Everything I Know About Love
author: Dolly Alderton
name: Saida
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/07
date added: 2024/07/07
shelves:
review:

]]>
Sirens & Muses 59336344
“Captures the ache-inducing quality of art and desire . . . a deeply relatable and profoundly enjoyable read, one drenched in prismatic color and light.”—Kristen Arnett, New York Times bestselling author of With Teeth

It’s 2011: America is in a deep recession and Occupy Wall Street is escalating. But at the elite Wrynn College of Art, students paint and sculpt in a rarefied bubble. Louisa Arceneaux is a thoughtful, observant nineteen-year-old when she transfers to Wrynn as a scholarship student, but she soon finds herself adrift in an environment that prizes novelty over beauty. Complicating matters is Louisa’s unexpected attraction to her charismatic roommate, Karina Piontek, the preternaturally gifted but mercurial daughter of wealthy art collectors. Gradually, Louisa and Karina are drawn into an intense sensual and artistic relationship, one that forces them to confront their deepest desires and fears. But Karina also can’t shake her fascination with Preston Utley, a senior and anti-capitalist Internet provocateur, who is publicly feuding with visiting professor and political painter Robert Berger—a once-controversial figurehead seeking to regain relevance.

When Preston concocts an explosive hoax, the fates of all four artists are upended as each is unexpectedly thrust into the cutthroat New York art world. Now all must struggle to find new identities in art, in society, and among each other. In the process, they must find either their most authentic terms of life—of success, failure, and joy—or risk losing themselves altogether.

With a canny, critical eye, Sirens & Muses overturns notions of class, money, art, youth, and a generation’s fight to own their future.]]>
368 Antonia Angress Saida 2 3.91 2022 Sirens & Muses
author: Antonia Angress
name: Saida
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2024/06/13
date added: 2024/06/13
shelves:
review:

]]>
Acts of Desperation 60021205
"Hot as viscera." — The New Republic

A "blistering anti-romance" (Catherine Lacey) about love addiction and what it does to us. Wouldn’t I do anything to reverse my loss, the absence of him?

In the first scene of this provocative gut-punch of a novel, our unnamed narrator meets a magnetic writer named Ciaran and falls, against her better judgment, completely in his power. After a brief, all-consuming romance he abruptly rejects her, sending her into a tailspin of jealous obsession and longing. If he ever comes back to her, she resolves to hang onto him and his love at all costs, even if it destroys her…
 
Part breathless confession, part lucid critique, Acts of Desperation renders a consciousness split between rebellion and submission, between escaping degradation and eroticizing it, between loving and being lovable. With unsettling, electric precision, Nolan dissects one of life’s most elusive Why do we want what we want, and how do we want it?
 
Heralding the arrival of a stunning new literary talent, Acts of Desperation interrogates the nature of fantasy, desire, and power, challenging us to reckon honestly with our own insatiability.]]>
288 Megan Nolan 031642983X Saida 5 3.88 2021 Acts of Desperation
author: Megan Nolan
name: Saida
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/27
date added: 2024/05/27
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Woman, Eating: A Literary Vampire Novel]]> 59626881 240 Claire Kohda 0063140896 Saida 3 Nothing rlly happened 3.48 2022 Woman, Eating: A Literary Vampire Novel
author: Claire Kohda
name: Saida
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/22
date added: 2024/05/22
shelves:
review:
Nothing rlly happened
]]>
Thinking About History 33930273
Designed for the classroom, Thinking About History is organized around big Whose history do we write, and how does that affect what stories get told and how they are told? How did we come to view the nation as the inevitable context for history, and what happens when we move outside those boundaries? What is the relation among popular, academic, and public history, and how should we evaluate sources? What is the difference between description and interpretation, and how do we balance them? Maza provides choice examples in place of definitive answers, and the result is a book that will spark classroom discussion and offer students a view of history as a vibrant, ever-changing field of inquiry that is thoroughly relevant to our daily lives.]]>
264 Sarah C. Maza 022610933X Saida 0 4.04 2017 Thinking About History
author: Sarah C. Maza
name: Saida
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/10
date added: 2024/04/10
shelves:
review:

]]>
The Cheese and the Worms 1134050
For a common miller, Menocchio was surprisingly literate. In his trial testimony he made references to more than a dozen books, including the Bible, Boccaccio's Decameron, Mandeville's Travels, and a "mysterious" book that may have been the Koran. And what he read he recast in terms familiar to him, as in his own version of the creation: "All was chaos, that is earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and of that bulk a mass formed—just as cheese is made out of milk—and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels."

Running time: 7.95 hours]]>
177 Carlo Ginzburg 0140060464 Saida 0 4.01 1976 The Cheese and the Worms
author: Carlo Ginzburg
name: Saida
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1976
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/10
date added: 2024/04/10
shelves:
review:

]]>
The Shadows 48842144
Paul Adams remembers the case all too well: Crabtree--and his victim--were Paul’s friends. Paul has slowly put his life back together. But now his mother, old and senile, has taken a turn for the worse. Though every inch of him resists, it is time to come home.

It's not long before things start to go wrong. Reading the news, Paul learns another copycat has struck. His mother is distressed, insistent that there's something in the house. And someone is following him. Which reminds him of the most unsettling thing about that awful day twenty-five years ago.

It wasn't just the murder.

It was the fact that afterward, Charlie Crabtree was never seen again...]]>
325 Alex North 1250318033 Saida 3 3.72 2020 The Shadows
author: Alex North
name: Saida
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/29
date added: 2024/03/29
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Things Fall Apart (The African Trilogy, #1)]]> 42402467
The second story, which is as modern as the first is ancient, and which elevates the book to a tragic plane, concerns the clash of cultures and the destruction of Okonkwo's world through the arrival of aggressive, proselytizing European missionaries. These twin dramas are perfectly harmonized, and they are modulated by an awareness capable of encompassing at once the life of nature, human history, and the mysterious compulsions of the soul. THINGS FALL APART is the most illuminating and permanent monument we have to the modern African experience as seen from within.]]>
212 Chinua Achebe Saida 5 3.83 1958 Things Fall Apart (The African Trilogy, #1)
author: Chinua Achebe
name: Saida
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1958
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/11
date added: 2024/03/11
shelves:
review:

]]>
Raybearer (Raybearer, #1) 56969396
Named one of the best books of the year by People magazine, Buzzfeed, New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, Kirkus Reviews , School Library Journal , Publishers Weekly , and more!

“Dazzling. . . . All hail Raybearer. ” —Entertainment Weekly
“Brilliantly conceived fantasy.” — People
“An exquisitely detailed world.” — PopSugar

Nothing is more important than loyalty. But what if you’ve sworn to protect the one you were born to destroy?

Tarisai has always longed for the warmth of a family. She was raised in isolation by a mysterious, often absent mother known only as the Lady. The Lady sends her to the capital of the global empire of Aritsar to compete with other children to be chosen as one of the Crown Prince’s Council of 11. If she’s picked, she’ll be joined with the other Council members through the Ray, a bond deeper than blood. That closeness is irresistible to Tarisai, who has always wanted to belong somewhere.

But the Lady has other ideas, including a magical wish that Tarisai is compelled to Kill the Crown Prince once she gains his trust. Tarisai won’t stand by and become someone’s pawn—but is she strong enough to choose a different path for herself? With extraordinary world-building and breathtaking prose, Raybearer is the story of loyalty, fate, and the lengths we’re willing to go for the ones we love.]]>
367 Jordan Ifueko 1419739832 Saida 4 4.5 stars 4.35 2020 Raybearer (Raybearer, #1)
author: Jordan Ifueko
name: Saida
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2022/04/10
date added: 2024/02/16
shelves:
review:
4.5 stars
]]>
One of Us Is Lying 63364287 One of Us Is Lying is the story of what happens when five strangers walk into detention and only four walk out alive. Everyone is a suspect, and everyone has something to hide.

On Monday afternoon, five students at Bayview High walk into detention.
Bronwyn, the brain, is Yale-bound and never breaks a rule.
Addy, the beauty, is the picture-perfect homecoming princess.
Nate, the criminal, is already on probation for dealing.
Cooper, the athlete, is the all-star baseball pitcher.
And Simon, the outcast, is the creator of Bayview High's notorious gossip app.

Only, Simon never makes it out of that classroom. Before the end of detention, Simon's dead. And according to investigators, his death wasn't an accident. On Monday, he died. But on Tuesday, he'd planned to post juicy reveals about all four of his high-profile classmates, which makes all four of them suspects in his murder. Or are they the perfect patsies for a killer who's still on the loose?
Everyone has secrets, right? What really matters is how far you would go to protect them.]]>
371 Karen M. McManus 1524714755 Saida 3 3.84 2017 One of Us Is Lying
author: Karen M. McManus
name: Saida
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2023/07/12
date added: 2023/07/12
shelves:
review:

]]>
I’m Glad My Mom Died 59366244
Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called “calorie restriction,” eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, “Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn’t tint hers?” She was even showered by Mom until age sixteen while sharing her diaries, email, and all her income.

In I’m Glad My Mom Died , Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail—just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly , she is thrust into fame. Though Mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club moderators and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi (“Hi Gale!”), Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants.

Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I’m Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair.]]>
304 Jennette McCurdy 1982185821 Saida 5 2022-favorites so phenomenal 4.41 2022 I’m Glad My Mom Died
author: Jennette McCurdy
name: Saida
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/08/10
date added: 2023/06/04
shelves: 2022-favorites
review:
so phenomenal
]]>
<![CDATA[Kill Joy (A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, #0.5)]]> 62649000 Welcome to the murder mystery party of the year! Fans of the hit series A Good Girl's Guide to Murder will love Pip's final detective case in this mystery novella from #1 New York Times bestselling author Holly Jackson.

Six suspects. Three hours. One murder...

Pip is not in the mood for her friend's murder mystery party. Especially one that involves 1920's fancy dress and pretending that their town is an island called Joy. But when the game begins, Pip finds herself drawn into the make-believe world of intrigue, deception and murder.

But as Pip plays detective, teasing out the identity of the killer clue-by-clue, the murder of the fictional Reginald Remy isn't the only case on her mind ...]]>
119 Holly Jackson 0593426215 Saida 4 3.75 2021 Kill Joy (A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, #0.5)
author: Holly Jackson
name: Saida
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/27
date added: 2023/05/27
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (The Hunger Games, #0)]]> 51901147 Ambition will fuel him.

Competition will drive him.

But power has its price.

It is the morning of the reaping that will kick off the tenth annual Hunger Games. In the Capitol, eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow is preparing for his one shot at glory as a mentor in the Games. The once-mighty house of Snow has fallen on hard times, its fate hanging on the slender chance that Coriolanus will be able to outcharm, outwit, and outmaneuver his fellow students to mentor the winning tribute.

The odds are against him. He's been given the humiliating assignment of mentoring the female tribute from District 12, the lowest of the low. Their fates are now completely intertwined -- every choice Coriolanus makes could lead to favor or failure, triumph or ruin. Inside the arena, it will be a fight to the death. Outside the arena, Coriolanus starts to feel for his doomed tribute... and must weigh his need to follow the rules against his desire to survive no matter what it takes.]]>
541 Suzanne Collins Saida 5 3.99 2020 The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (The Hunger Games, #0)
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Saida
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/04
date added: 2023/05/04
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, #3)]]> 7260188 My name is Katniss Everdeen.
Why am I not dead?
I should be dead.

Katniss Everdeen, girl on fire, has survived, even though her home has been destroyed. Gale has escaped. Katniss's family is safe. Peeta has been captured by the Capitol. District 13 really does exist. There are rebels. There are new leaders. A revolution is unfolding.

It is by design that Katniss was rescued from the arena in the cruel and haunting Quarter Quell, and it is by design that she has long been part of the revolution without knowing it. District 13 has come out of the shadows and is plotting to overthrow the Capitol. Everyone, it seems, has had a hand in the carefully laid plans—except Katniss.

The success of the rebellion hinges on Katniss's willingness to be a pawn, to accept responsibility for countless lives, and to change the course of the future of Panem. To do this, she must put aside her feelings of anger and distrust. She must become the rebels' Mockingjay—no matter what the personal cost.]]>
390 Suzanne Collins 0439023513 Saida 5 4.10 2010 Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, #3)
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Saida
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/13
date added: 2023/04/13
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2)]]> 6148028 Sparks are igniting.
Flames are spreading.
And the Capitol wants revenge.

Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has won the Hunger Games. She and fellow District 12 tribute Peeta Mellark are miraculously still alive. Katniss should be relieved, happy even. After all, she has returned to her family and her longtime friend, Gale. Yet nothing is the way Katniss wishes it to be. Gale holds her at an icy distance. Peeta has turned his back on her completely. And there are whispers of a rebellion against the Capitol—a rebellion that Katniss and Peeta may have helped create.

Much to her shock, Katniss has fueled an unrest that she's afraid she cannot stop. And what scares her even more is that she's not entirely convinced she should try. As time draws near for Katniss and Peeta to visit the districts on the Capitol's cruel Victory Tour, the stakes are higher than ever. If they can't prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that they are lost in their love for each other, the consequences will be horrifying.

In Catching Fire, the second novel of the Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins continues the story of Katniss Everdeen, testing her more than ever before . . . and surprising readers at every turn.]]>
391 Suzanne Collins 0439023491 Saida 5 4.34 2009 Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2)
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Saida
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/04
date added: 2023/04/04
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1)]]> 2767052
In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV.

Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she steps forward to take her sister's place in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before-and survival, for her, is second nature. Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender. But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weigh survival against humanity and life against love.]]>
374 Suzanne Collins 0439023483 Saida 5 4.34 2008 The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1)
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Saida
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/29
date added: 2023/03/29
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Return of the King (The Lord of the Rings, #3)]]> 18512 here.

The Companions of the Ring have become involved in separate adventures as the quest continues. Aragorn, revealed as the hidden heir of the ancient Kings of the West, joined with the Riders of Rohan against the forces of Isengard, and took part in the desperate victory of the Hornburg. Merry and Pippin, captured by Orcs, escaped into Fangorn Forest and there encountered the Ents. Gandalf returned, miraculously, and defeated the evil wizard, Saruman. Meanwhile, Sam and Frodo progressed towards Mordor to destroy the Ring, accompanied by SmEagol--Gollum, still obsessed by his 'precious'. After a battle with the giant spider, Shelob, Sam left his master for dead; but Frodo is still alive--in the hands of the Orcs. And all the time the armies of the Dark Lord are massing. J.R.R. Tolkien's great work of imaginative fiction has been labeled both a heroic romance and a classic fantasy fiction. By turns comic and homely, epic and diabolic, the narrative moves through countless changes of scene and character in an imaginary world which is totally convincing in its detail.]]>
404 J.R.R. Tolkien Saida 5 I’m crying 4.54 1955 The Return of the King (The Lord of the Rings, #3)
author: J.R.R. Tolkien
name: Saida
average rating: 4.54
book published: 1955
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/27
date added: 2023/03/27
shelves:
review:
I’m crying
]]>
<![CDATA[The Two Towers (The Lord of the Rings, #2)]]> 15241
Frodo and his Companions of the Ring have been beset by danger during their quest to prevent the Ruling Ring from falling into the hands of the Dark Lord by destroying it in the Cracks of Doom. They have lost the wizard, Gandalf, in a battle in the Mines of Moria. And Boromir, seduced by the power of the Ring, tried to seize it by force. While Frodo and Sam made their escape, the rest of the company was attacked by Orcs.

Now they continue the journey alone down the great River Anduin -- alone, that is, save for the mysterious creeping figure that follows wherever they go.]]>
322 J.R.R. Tolkien 0618346260 Saida 5 4.45 1954 The Two Towers (The Lord of the Rings, #2)
author: J.R.R. Tolkien
name: Saida
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1954
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/07
date added: 2023/03/07
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1)]]> 11846672
THE GREATEST FANTASY EPIC OF OUR TIME

The dark, fearsome Ringwraiths were searching for a hobbit. Frodo Baggins knew they were seeking him and the Ring he bore - the Ring of Power that would enable evil Sauron to destroy all that was good in Middle-earth. Now it is up to Frodo and his faithful servant, Sam, with a small band of companions, to carry the Ring to the one place it could be destroyed - Mount Doom, in the very center of Sauron's dark kingdom.
--back cover]]>
458 J.R.R. Tolkien Saida 5 4.44 1954 The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1)
author: J.R.R. Tolkien
name: Saida
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1954
rating: 5
read at: 2023/02/12
date added: 2023/02/12
shelves:
review:

]]>
Steelstriker (Skyhunter, #2) 43851082 Explosive action and swoon-worthy suspense collide in this riveting conclusion to the Skyhunter duet from #1 New York Times–bestselling author Marie Lu

As a Striker, Talin was taught loyalty is life. Loyalty to the Shield who watches your back, to the Strikers who risk their lives on the battlefield, and most of all, to Mara, which was once the last nation free from the Karensa Federation’s tyranny.

But Mara has fallen. And its destruction has unleashed Talin’s worst nightmare.

With her friends scattered by combat and her mother held captive by the Premier, Talin is forced to betray her fellow Strikers and her adopted homeland. She has no choice but to become the Federation’s most deadly war machine as their newest Skyhunter.

Red is no stranger to the cruelty of the Federation or the torture within its Skyhunter labs, but he knows this isn’t the end for Mara – or Talin. The link between them may be weak, but it could be Talin and Red's only hope to salvage their past and safeguard their future.

While the fate of a broken world hangs in the balance, Talin and Red must reunite the Strikers and find their way back to each other in this smoldering sequel to Marie Lu’s Skyhunter.]]>
384 Marie Lu 1250221730 Saida 3 3.5 stars 3.93 2021 Steelstriker (Skyhunter, #2)
author: Marie Lu
name: Saida
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2023/02/02
date added: 2023/02/02
shelves:
review:
3.5 stars
]]>
Five Survive 60788826
When their RV breaks down in the middle of nowhere with no cell service, they soon realize this is no accident. They have been trapped by someone out there in the dark, someone who clearly wants one of them dead.

With eight hours until dawn, the six friends must escape, or figure out which of them is the target. But is there a liar among them? Buried secrets will be forced to light and tensions inside the RV will reach deadly levels. Not all of them will survive the night...

Eight hours. Six friends. Five survive. A road trip turns deadly in this addictive YA thriller from the bestselling author of the worldwide phenomenon A GOOD GIRL'S GUIDE TO MURDER.]]>
388 Holly Jackson 0593374169 Saida 5 3.96 2022 Five Survive
author: Holly Jackson
name: Saida
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/29
date added: 2023/01/29
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Darkest Part of the Forest]]> 45450063 A girl makes a secret sacrifice to the faerie king in this lush New York Times bestselling fantasy by author Holly Black

In the woods is a glass coffin. It rests on the ground, and in it sleeps a boy with horns on his head and ears as pointed as knives....

Hazel and her brother, Ben, live in Fairfold, where humans and the Folk exist side by side. Since they were children, Hazel and Ben have been telling each other stories about the boy in the glass coffin, that he is a prince and they are valiant knights, pretending their prince would be different from the other faeries, the ones who made cruel bargains, lurked in the shadows of trees, and doomed tourists. But as Hazel grows up, she puts aside those stories. Hazel knows the horned boy will never wake.
Until one day, he does...

As the world turns upside down, Hazel has to become the knight she once pretended to be.

The Darkest Part of the Forest is bestselling author Holly Black's triumphant return to the opulent, enchanting faerie tales that launched her YA career.]]>
368 Holly Black 0316536210 Saida 3 3.86 2015 The Darkest Part of the Forest
author: Holly Black
name: Saida
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2021/07/10
date added: 2022/11/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
Lies Like Wildfire 59005906 A story about five friends and the deadly secret that could send their lives up in flames.

In Gap Mountain, California, everyone knows about fire season. And no one is more vigilant than 18-year-old Hannah Warner, the sheriff's daughter and aspiring FBI agent. That is until this summer. When Hannah and her best friends accidentally spark an enormous and deadly wildfire, their instinct is to lie to the police and the fire investigators.

But as the blaze roars through their rural town and towards Yosemite National Park, Hannah's friends begin to crack and she finds herself going to extreme lengths to protect their secret. Because sometimes good people do bad things. And if there’s one thing people hate, it’s liars.]]>
0 Jennifer Lynn Alvarez 0593433882 Saida 4 3.31 2021 Lies Like Wildfire
author: Jennifer Lynn Alvarez
name: Saida
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2022/10/17
date added: 2022/10/17
shelves:
review:

]]>
Firekeeper’s Daughter 52346471
After Daunis witnesses a shocking murder that thrusts her into a criminal investigation, she agrees to go undercover. But the deceptions—and deaths—keep piling up and soon the threat strikes too close to home. How far will she go to protect her community if it means tearing apart the only world she’s ever known?]]>
496 Angeline Boulley Saida 5 2022-favorites 4.31 2021 Firekeeper’s Daughter
author: Angeline Boulley
name: Saida
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/08/25
date added: 2022/10/17
shelves: 2022-favorites
review:

]]>