The Bride Test by Helen Hoang
Bingo Square: Listicle When I saw the Listicle category, I figured the easiest way to find a list with something I wanted to read would be to google “Best Books of 2019” or “Summer Reads for 2019,” and Cosmopolitan came through for me. It had a few novels I had already read and enjoyed, a few that were already on my to read list, and has given me a few more novels to keep an eye out for. The Bride Test fell into the second […]
The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard
With my last review, of Pierce Brown’s Red Rising, I spent a bit of time musing on what might helps you decide whether or not to start new book series, and what compels you to continue. In the case of Aliette de Bodard’s The Tea Master and The Detective, I didn’t so much choose to start a new series as much as I stumbled into one. Thankfully, most of the books in the Xuya Universe can be read as stand alones, because as it […]
Circe by Madeline Miller
Oh, how I loved this. I saw everyone’s glowing comments on it on last year’s Cannonball Read, but my TBR pile was so big I couldn’t justify buying a new book. Luckily I made an exception and once I picked it up last week I couldn’t put it down. I have a backlog of reviews I need to write for other books I finished before I finished Circe, but I wanted to review this one first, before my feelings faded. Miller’s novel is a modern […]
Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Bingo Square: Pajiba The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo was one of my favorite reads this year (review forthcoming, eventually, hopefully), so I was excited to realize Reid had a new novel out. When I started actually going through the Bingo board and looking through the Pajiba archive, I was even more excited to realize that I could read it for that square – I was actually trying to find Dustin’s article on Baby Teeth because I thought I might finally use this as the […]
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
I have been waiting a loooooong while for this book to get into my eager hands. A work friend extolled its virtues and it is the September book club pick for one of the clubs I’m in AND I figured it would be good for any number of bingo squares. I went with Far and Away because both the geographical and cultural differences from where I’m sitting in the American Midwest to rural Korea in the 1900s are expansive. While I was reading it, I […]
You Must Not Miss by Katrina Leno
Bingo Square: Youths! I was intrigued by MrsLangdonAlger’s review of this, but despite her warning of how it was hard to describe and defied expectations, the novel description on Amazon made me expect a certain narrative flow, and as a result, something about the ending didn’t quite work for me. It starts off so great! Magpie or Mags or Margaret, depending on who she is interacting with, is a sophomore in high school and close to failing. Her family life has collapsed in the last […]
