April!

[Rowan]

Sorry ladies....apparently I'm slacking.

I've been on an ARC tear lately.

Darling Girls by Sally Hepworth - 3.5 stars. I liked it but didn't LOVE it. Australia setting is always fun. Some good twists.
The Nature of Disappearing by Kimi Cunningham Grant - 3.5 stars. This was a really fast read for me. Outdoors/hiking/tracking which was interesting.

Not sure what's next - I have a few thrillers on my stack but I'm kinda in the mood for something else. I may grab a romance of my own shelf...I'm kinda in the mood for that right now.

[Blush]

I will definitely have to check out the Sally Hepworth.

The rom com I read was cute.

Now I am most of the way through The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. It's challenging assumptions we've had about how previous societies lived. Bit of a slog, but some interesting points. (For example: surprise, a woman anthropologist was dismissed as crazy until after she died and male anthropologists came to the same conclusion).

[Rowan]

This weekend I read The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood - a STEM romance. I liked it - I was worried that the STEM parts would be wrong but they were real maybe not 100% but I understand why it may have been changed. It is a bit more "open door" than I prefer but I skimmed those paragraphs.

I just finished The Divorcees by Rowan Beaird which is about women at a "divorce ranch" in Reno in the 1950s. I really liked this one although incredibly infuriating how women were treated in the 1950s. Funny how the last 40 pages of a book can feel rushed and make me drop a half star from the rating, this one increased the rating by a half star.

Not quite ready to go back to thriller world so not sure what I'll pick next.

[Blush]

I finished The Dawn of Everything. I feel like it was important but it wasn't all that compelling. Might be better as a documentary.

Then I read Who We Are Now by Lauren Chamberlain. It followed university roommates through their early adulthood. It was good.

I just finished Cassandra In Reverse by Holly Smales. This was cute.

Now I have a nonfiction: Doppelganger by Naomi Klein (“If the Naomi be Klein / you’re doing just fine / If the Naomi be Wolf / Oh, buddy. Ooooof.”)

[Spudd]

I finished All the Broken Places by John Boyne the other day. I loved it so much.

Now I started The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver. So far I also love it.

[Blush]

Spudd, I need to order that John Boyne book.

[Sílvia]

I finished All the Broken Places by John Boyne the other day. I loved it so much.

Now I started The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver. So far I also love it.

Oh yay, glad to hear you loved All the Broken Places! Isn't the ending perfect?? I liked The Mandibles, too. Didn't love it because there's too much economics talk, but the premise and the plot were brilliant.

Let's see, where did I stop? I finished the Tess Gerritsen, which was entertaining enough, but not as good as the others I've read by her. Then I read 2 Brazilians that *gasp* HAVE been translated into English! The first one was The Dark Side of Skin by Jeferson Tenório: https://www.amazon.com.br/Dark-Side-Ski ... 215&sr=8-1, which is basically about racism and too depressing (I know, that's kind of the point, but it was not for me), and the other was The Head of the Saint by Socorro Acioli, which I really enjoyed: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/224 ... dPW&rank=1, but I don't know why the English publishers are calling it YA. it is very much NOT YA. Also, there seem to be 2 versions of this book in English, and they don't tell the exact same story, based on the synopsis This is the one I read.

Now I'm reading The Plot and enjoying it. I read Yellowface earlier this year and it's basically the same story and came out later. Why isn't R.F. Kuang being accused of plagiarism?

[Blush]

The Naomi Klein book was really good.

Then I read Coronation by Jennifer Robson; good palate cleanser after the mindfuck of Doppelganger.

Yesterday I picked up the brand new Emily Henry book, Funny Story.

[Spudd]

The Mandibles strikes me as a personal political statement book and I don't know how I feel about that. Also, there's too much financial talk, and I'm generally into financial shit! All in all it started off really strong and now I'm just slogging through. Sadly I recommended it to my friend when I was still at the "strong start" portion of the book and she bought it. I hope she's not hating it.

[Sílvia]

Spudd, that's exactly how I felt about The Mandibles. It's SUCH a unique premise, a bleak future caused by financial ruin and not a virus/war/zombies/climate change. Why did she have to ruin that with all the financial talk?? That book would have been so much better if they'd cut about 150 pages.

I finished The Plot. It was good, not great. I really enjoyed the first half, not so much the second. But I liked the ending.

Then I read These Silent Woods, which I thought I'd love, but ended up giving 2 stars to. It started out strong, but got boring about halfway through, and the ending was more ridiculously unbelievable than those in popcorn thrillers. At least popcorn thrillers are more fun. But never mind me, it has an average rating of more than 4 on goodreads.

Now I'm reading Strange Sally Diamond, which I'm thoroughly enjoying, and sort of also Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell. I've been super curious about Hamnet for so long, but the beginning was SO slow. I decided to read just a few pages here and there and see if I could manage to finish it, and now, after like a month and about 100 pages, it seems to be picking up. We'll see.