**Many thanks to @SimonBooks and Ray Bradbury for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!**
To Harry Potter fans and Shakespeare afi**Many thanks to @SimonBooks and Ray Bradbury for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!**
To Harry Potter fans and Shakespeare aficionados alike: I would wager these words in this title are MORE than a bit familiar. It's hard to even read it aloud without thinking of some of the most enduring works of our time, and to say this book is legendary in the genre is to do it an injustice. Often considered Bradbury's best and most enticing tale, Something Wicked This Way Comes COULD have been just another dark, macabre story...but managed to influence the pantheon in ways NOBODY saw coming!
The tale itself is fairly simple: two 13 year old boys, Jim and Will, are the best of friends and just plugging along in their day to day lives in their small Illinois town, Green Town. On one particularly eerie autumn night, however, the boys discover that an eerie carnival, Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, is rolling into town...and it's like no carnival they've ever seen before. With a haunted carousel, terrifying mirror maze, and a creepy 'ringmaster' Mr. Dark at its helm, Jim and Will MAY have landed in the middle of more than they bargained for...but can Will's father Charles Halloway save them with a bit of well-timed wisdom? Or will the forces of evil be too strong and unrelenting to let the boys make it until the circus once again rolls out of town?
I understand why this book was influential and popular and yet, at the same time, learning more about it in the second half and its origin story illuminated exactly WHY this book didn't quite work for me.
In short...it started as a screenplay.
Of course, in subsequent years film adaptations popped up regardless...but this finished product of a novel still had the ring of 'meant for the screen' coloring all of its pages, and combined with some portions of overly heavy prose...this book took me entirely TOO long to read. You can tell it was originally meant for a somewhat wide audience, with somewhat short chapters and of course our two adolescent protagonists at the helm...but once the allusions to religion, et al got a bit heavy, I had trouble losing myself fully in the creepiness of the premise. Aside from the GENIUS carousel bit (and that part is definitely memorable), the weird and wonderful setting descriptors got a bit long, and many of the passages a bit verbose for my personal taste so it took what could have been a lighter read and made it drag quite a bit.
The flip side to this, however, is that this particular edition has a fascinating 'epilogue' of sorts, with essays from other authors and the history of the book, as well as excerpts from original drafts included and THIS expository content alone was worth the price of admission....more
Believe me when I say I gave this one my BEST shot. I actually put it down for over a week, hoping after I cleansed my palate with a DNF @ 39%
I tried.
Believe me when I say I gave this one my BEST shot. I actually put it down for over a week, hoping after I cleansed my palate with a couple of VERY different reads, this one would suddenly be the captivating literary experience I'd been hoping for, with an 'offbeat' May-September romance that would somehow jump from "icky" to "intriguing" (Even if it was STILL a little bit icky...I mean, when your best friend gets romantically involved with your mom...it's hard to completely avoid the ick.) ...more
**Many thanks to @SimonBooks and @CarolynMacklerBooks for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! Now available as of 6.27!**
Accord**Many thanks to @SimonBooks and @CarolynMacklerBooks for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! Now available as of 6.27!**
According to recent research, it is estimated that stay-at-home moms provide around 98 HOURS of unpaid, unseen, invisible labor a week; some estimates are even higher than this.
...But what if there were a way for moms/wives to FINALLY get paid?
Lauren, Madeline, and Sophie are three best friends with a lot in common...and now they can add one more shared attribute to the list: they are all divorced. After a sneaking suspicion that something was just off, mom of twins Lauren finds something very disturbing on his phone: her hubby is paying for sexual satisfaction elsewhere. Feeling numb, this is the straw that breaks the camel's back in her marriage, and Lauren is ready for a divorce.
At Lauren's divorce celebration with her two besties, the women lament the pains of the mental load and how much they do for their spouses that not only goes unappreciated, but entirely unseen: everything from keeping track of doctor's appointments to party planning to making sure their kids have the clean clothes they need before school on Monday morning. After a few round of cocktails, the group jokingly decides that they need to find a way to make this free labor a little less free and propose the Wife App, an app where women (and men, and any interested gender!) can sign up to be a Wife and command top dollar for these undesirable tasks.
It sounds like nothing more than a passing fancy at first, Lauren gets some legs (and some finances) behind the project and before they know it, the app is up and running...and has a growing customer base! Madeline starts to resent being a wife for pay, however, as it cuts into her free-wheeling Samantha Jones-like escapades...AND her once tight-knit relationship with her daughter is threatened when her ex-husband across the pond wants to bring her to London for an entire YEAR. Sophie tries not to feel FOMO when she looks at her husband's beautiful new SO, Beatrice and family...but are her feelings MORE than just feelings of jealousy?
As the three women navigate their individual struggles and fight to keep up with the app's demand, can they HANDLE the extra burden of being wives for hire...and is the bountiful cash incentive enough to keep them going? Can these friendships stand the test of time and added pressure...or are they the next relationships destined to fall apart?
I'll be honest, I was worried at first that the concept of The Wife App might read as a bit silly, much like many books centered around social media, influencers, or the like. But what became quickly apparent after the first couple of chapters in this book is that these are three dynamic, interesting women who, despite their life circumstances as NYC dwellers, were WHOLLY relatable..and wholly lovable! The POV cycles neatly between the narratives of Sophie, Madeline, and Lauren, and the characters never felt too similar to one another and were equally enticing and fun to read. Although I personally struggled the most with Madeline, I even grew to care about her struggles by story's end, despite the occasional disconnect.
But characters aside, the best aspect of this book is its premise, and despite the mild suspension of disbelief required, Mackler did SUCH an expert job covering the depth, breadth, and impact of all of this invisible labor...and how it not only affects women mentally, but physically and emotionally as well. The characters didn't bemoan their plight, but rather, just gave it a voice, and sadly, the people who probably need to read this most will never pick it up. However, despite the topic, this book is full of laughter and fun to balance out all of the heavier discussions about divorce and the emotions that follow such a dramatic shift. You genuinely root for the women to succeed AND the app to succeed, while realizing the two are not mutually exclusive.
Despite the room for it, Mackler never resorts to man bashing or making jokes at anyone's expense: she also takes the care to include some representation from the LGBT community, and to make it clear that this is not an app designed to include romantic 'favors' or entanglements. I appreciated the balanced approach, and it gave further credence to an idea that is a bit fantastic in some respects. This was a bit SATC, but mom style,and any book that gets me this invested is one I wouldn't hesitate to recommend!
There have been books popping up aplenty in the 'females take their revenge' subgenre lately (many thrillers, some not) but it was a joy to find one that was simply 'females use their VOICES' to send a message loud and clear: we all deserve to get paid for the work that we do...and if we're going to bear the brunt of the invisible labor, we STILL deserve to be seen. ...more
**Many thanks to @SimonBooks and Kyle Dillon Hertz for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! Now available as of 8.1!**
"There are**Many thanks to @SimonBooks and Kyle Dillon Hertz for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! Now available as of 8.1!**
"There are some things that once you've lost, you never get back. Innocence is one. Love is another. I guess childhood is a third.“ - John Marsden
Dylan is 2 for 3: he lost his childhood AND innocence as a victim of sex trafficking at the hands of Vincent, a man who promised him love when he turned 18 in the form of a proposed marriage. Of course, this never came to pass, and all of the men who took advantage of Dylan still haunt him...but none have been brought to justice. To make matters worse, once the statute of limitations has passed, prosecution seems even further out of reach. Dylan is struggling to make life work with his husband, Moans, and tries not to think about the horrors of his past, as though reliving the trauma will make his current existence come crashing down.
When a new law is passed, however, the Child Victims Act seems like a beacon of hope: Dylan now has a one year window to sue his abusers. But in order to move forward, he's got to go back...and reliving some of his trauma takes him down a dangerous road. Will Dylan keep his secrets from the past a secret...AND keep his marriage intact? Will justice be swift..or is this chance at recourse too little, too late?
Anytime you're dealing with trauma...things get messy. Feelings are complex animals, no matter how you slice it, and I went into this read expecting to feel a sort of gut-wrenching empathy for our main character, as he rediscovered his past and attempted to find a future. I expected there to be descriptions and perhaps even graphic depictions of some of the abhorrent acts committed in his past.
What I didn't expect? Page after page after page of messy, overly descriptive, and at times NEEDLESSLY graphic stories of the MC's sex life. And this didn't focus solely on the events from his past, even...MUCH of this book is set in the present, which means long and wordy and frankly GROSS passages that were hardly even necessary. For instance...if someone is performing bodily functions in someone else's orifice, hearing about it once is already too much. I DO NOT need to keep reading things like that over and over. I almost DNFd this book soon after starting for this very reason, but I kept hoping things would get better...and sad to say, they did not.
Despite the blurb and what you are led to believe about this story, Dylan doesn't really even begin to fully tackle his issues until the book is 80% OVER...which means for the duration, you are mainly treated to all of the aforementioned loose behavior he is currently exhibiting in his life with husband Moans...and some other men too. (Sidenote: WHY would you call a character Moans? Just weird. ...more
**Many thanks to @SimonBooks and Lara Love Hardin for a gifted copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! Now available as of 8.1!**
"Escape w**Many thanks to @SimonBooks and Lara Love Hardin for a gifted copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! Now available as of 8.1!**
"Escape was always my real addiction, the one true high. Books were just my gateway drug. Sex just got me pregnant. Food just made me puffy. Vicodin just helped me pretend I was happy. The heroin, though, that gave me everything I had ever wanted--peace, joy, escape.
Until it didn't.
And everything I knew and everyone I loved was gone.”
Lara Love Hardin was the model Mom Next Door: good job, fancy house, lovely family. Until one day she finds herself leading a very different life, stealing credit cards out of her neighbors' mailboxes to help fund her drug addiction. Hardin would do anything for her kids, so she attempts to shield them from this lifestyle and outrun the law. But when the cops show up at her door, she ends up convicted of 32 felonies...and set to potentially lose custody of her youngest son forever.
The year in confinement passes slowly for Hardin, but she struggles to find her way and her place in the hierarchy of the jail, eventually earning the moniker "Mama Love." But with her opportunity to hold onto custody hanging in the balance and a certain man in her life encouraging her to go right back to drugs, can Mama Love embrace the possibilities and potential of a brand new life? Or is the pull of addiction enough to keep her held tight in its deadly snare?
I knew very little about Hardin going into this book, but by the end of the first chapter, that feeling was but a fleeting memory. Hardin is a deep and reflective soul, a word nerd, and she has struggled with insecurity and feeling out of place for much of her life. In other words? We have a LOT in common...and I was INSTANTLY enraptured by her story. This memoir is the kind of read that ALMOST feels like fiction, because the narrative was SO compelling. Hardin takes the reader on such an intense journey in such a short amount of time, and as a reader, you genuinely have no idea where she's headed next!
Hardin explores the shame and stigma that society places on those who have been incarcerated AND systemic problems surrounding recidivism all while never holding back the good, bad, and ugly of her own journey, and she does so with a beautiful vulnerability that will touch your heart. Her journey isn't linear, and neither is pain: but when I tell you it ends with the Dalai Lama and Oprah...well, you have to read it to believe it!...more
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