Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Release date: June 5th, 2018
Series: Beartown #2
Pages: 448
Genre: Fiction
Series: Beartown #2
Pages: 448
Genre: Fiction
After everything that the citizens of Beartown have gone through, they are struck yet another blow when they hear that their beloved local hockey team will soon be disbanded. What makes it worse is the obvious satisfaction that all the former Beartown players, who now play for a rival team in Hed, take in that fact. Amidst the mounting tension between the two rivals, a surprising newcomer is handpicked to be Beartown’s new hockey coach.
Soon a new team starts to take shape around Amat, the fastest player you’ll ever see; Benji, the intense lone wolf; and Vidar, a born-to-be-bad troublemaker. But bringing this team together proves to be a challenge as old bonds are broken, new ones are formed, and the enmity with Hed grows more and more acute.
As the big match approaches, the not-so-innocent pranks and incidents between the communities pile up and their mutual contempt grows deeper. By the time the last game is finally played, a resident of Beartown will be dead, and the people of both towns will be forced to wonder if, after all they’ve been through, the game they love can ever return to something simple and innocent.
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❝Because sometimes hating one another is so easy that it seems incomprehensible that we ever do anything else.❞
It's not a secret that I fell in love with Backman's writing and he, once again, pleasantly surprised me with this book once again. If I thought it couldn't get better than the first book ... he gladly proved me wrong.
Backman deals with many things that aren't easy to deal with: rape, politics, death, failed marriage, LGBT. This book is packed with emotions and he writes everything so beautifully, it really feels like a punch in the stomach.
It's a difficult read at times, especially because you have to expect the unexpected. Backman builds the anticipation up high, making you expect something bad, but then it turns out to not be that bad at the end. He does this a few times, so when you finally relax and when something bad happens, you think 'oh, it'll turn out good, like every other time'. But it can happen so many times before it actually doesn't turn out good at all - it turns out worse than you expected and hoped for.
I truly don't have any words for how Backman's words and books make me feel. No one compares to him and his writing and I swear I have to pause a little every time I finish reading his book, because I know that no one will come even close to him and every other book will just feel like not good enough.
I couldn't recommend his books more. He's easily and quickly became one of my favourite writers.
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Series: / standalone
Pages: 343
Genre: Fiction
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect?
Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.
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❝People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely.❞
Once again, an unpopular opinion about yet another popular book: this book was ok, but that's all.
Overall, this story pulled me in with the promise of something different, educating and interesting, but it wasn't all that. It was different, yes, and it was also educating and, normally, I really enjoy reading books about this, but I did not really enjoy this one because I didn't like the way it was written.
This book didn't follow one storyline, but it jumped between different stories and different people. The first half of the book was focused on the Vignes twin sisters, the second half they disappeared more into the backstory.
It took me some time at first to really get into the story and figure out what exactly it's talking about and I had a hard time staying focused and following the story because it was so jumpy and really uninteresting, with the exception of some parts. This was definitely not one of those books that I wasn't able to put down - on the contrary, I couldn't wait to finish it.
I enjoyed the first half a lot more than the second half because I didn't know anymore in which direction this book wants to take me.
And, boy, how the ending left me unsatisfied. I expected a lot more from it, the meeting of the sisters was dry and not at all what I wanted and what the story was building up to it and promising.
I don't know ... this book had some great aspects, it showed how much someone is willing to sacrifice to be someone else, to belong somewhere and to be like others. It's heartbreaking, but it just wasn't my cup of tea because I expected a lot more, unfortunately.
❝The key to staying lost was to never love anything.❞
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Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the 2014 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and her debut novel The Mothers was a New York Times bestseller. Her second novel The Vanishing Half was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. Her essays have been featured in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel.
Release date: July 31st, 2012
Series: / standalone
Pages: 362
Genre: Historical fiction
Australia, 1926. After four harrowing years fighting on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns home to take a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day's journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season and shore leaves are granted every other year at best, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby's cries on the wind. A boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby.
Tom, whose records as a lighthouse keeper are meticulous and whose moral principles have withstood a horrific war, wants to report the man and infant immediately. But Isabel has taken the tiny baby to her breast. Against Tom's judgment, they claim her as their own and name her Lucy. When she is two, Tom and Isabel return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other people in the world. Their choice has devastated one of them.
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❝Life could snatch away the things you treasured, and there was no getting them back.❞
I admit I dove into this book without knowing what it really is about because it was recommended to me by a friend and it actually turned out as a really interesting read.
Although I did not find this story sad enough to cry at the end, it was written in a sad undertone throughout the whole book. Tom and Isabel have a difficult life and despite being good people and trying to do the right thing, they make a wrong decision once they see a baby at the shore.
Isabel, after losing three babies already, is ecstatic and she wants to keep the little girl, but Tom has restrictions. He knows this is forbidden and he knows what's going to wait for him if someone finds out about what they did, but he still obliges just to make his wife happy again.
Their action has consequences for all of them: Tom, Isabel, little Lucy and the mother of the child. They have consequences for their families and friends, too.
It's a difficult book to read sometimes, especially because it deals with many moral aspects. You have to really get in the head of the characters to really understand where they're coming from because everyone has their right and everyone has different motives and wishes.
But who's right in this situation? What is the right thing to do?
Many wrong decisions have been made already. Do they want to make more of them?
This book is, without a doubt, a sad book with a happy ending on its own, but still sad. This is a book about good people making bad decisions and having to pay for them.
It's an interesting book, but I felt it was a little dragging at some parts and it could be shortened to make it more interesting, especially towards the end.
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M.L. Stedman was born and raised in Western Australia and now lives in London. The Light Between Oceans is her first novel.
Release date: June 19th, 2014
Series: Rabbit Hayes #1
Pages: 368
Genre: Fiction
Here is a truth that can't be escaped: for Mia "Rabbit" Hayes, life is coming to an end ...
Mia-"Rabbit"-Hayes knows that life is hard for everyone. And she knows that she's one of the lucky ones. She loves her life, ordinary as it is. And she loves the extraordinary people in it: her spirited daughter, Juliet; her colorful, unruly family; the only man in her big heart, Johnny Faye. Rabbit has big ideas, full of music and love and so much life. She has plans for the world. But the world, it turns out, has other plans for Rabbit: a devastating diagnosis.
Rabbit is feisty. And with every ounce of love and strength in her, she promises that she will overcome. She will fight fight fight. She will be with those who love her for as long as she can, and she will live as long as she can with music and love and so much life. And as her friends and family rally round to celebrate Rabbit's last days, they look to her for strength, support, and her unyielding zest for life. Because she is Rabbit Hayes and she will live until she dies.
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❝She wasn't angry or even that frustrated. She wasn't scared or worried. She wasn't bitter or vengeful. She was just sad to leave the people she loved most, especially her daughter. She had fought for so long, but finally she knew that she couldn't go on.❞
This was such a heartfelt story! Although even though I knew what this story is about and how it's going to end when I picked it up, I still cried like a baby at the end.
This was written lightly with a lot of jokes and humour, yet still had this deeply serious and sad undertone. This story gave me so much more than I expected - I really didn't expect Rabbit to tell her sad love story that ended because, Gosh, that was so unexpected and it really added even more sadness to this story.
I don't think I need to talk about what this story is about since the title says it pretty much all: Rabbit Hayes living her last days before cancer takes her.
It's a heavy book, dealing with heavy feelings. It's written from multiple POVs and it's truly hard sometimes to read about how people that are close to Rabbit deal with her dying. It's hard, but these stories don't only happen in the book, unfortunately, and this is why I think it's good to read stories like this here and there.
This is not as much about Rabbit as her, but generally how people close to someone with cancer take it and how they deal with it. It felt like I became friends with all of these people, so the ending was all that harder for me because I, too, felt like losing a friend.
I don't think you can stay cold-hearted while reading this. It just crawls deep under your skin if you like it or not and I think you can never truly be fully prepared for someone's life to end - just like I wasn't truly prepared for the ending of this book.
The only reason I gave this book 4.5 stars is because this book was written for multiple POVs and sometimes it was hard for me to tell who is who because there were so many people.
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Anna McPartlin is an international best selling author, currently published in 15 languages across 18 countries. Pack Up The Moon and The Last Days of Rabbit Hayes were nominated for Irish book awards. Rabbit Hayes also won a silver readers book award in Germany. In the UK it was a Simon Mayo and Richard and Judy book club pick and in the USA it was a Barnes & Nobel Book of the Month.
In the last few years Anna has been honing her TV scriptwriting skills working on medical drama ‘Holby City’ for the BBC (UK), legal drama ‘Striking Out,’ for RTE (IRE) and historical adaptation Jesus His Life for History Channel (USA).
Anna was nominated for an Irish Film & Television Academy award for her one off bi-lingual drama ‘School Run,’ and is currently in development with Hot Drop Films / Treasure Entertainment and funded by Screen Ireland for the film adaptation of ‘Rabbit Hayes.’ She is also in development for a crime series ‘Serious Crimes,’ with Blinder Productions (Virgin Media) in IRE. A historical crime drama with Noho Film & TV (UK) and ‘Richter,’ an RTE/NZ TV co-production crime drama with Blinder Productions.
Anna’s first children’s book the ‘Fearless Five’ came out May 2019. Her next fiction novel ‘Below The Big Blue Sky,’ is on shelves in UK and IRE in April 2020 and she is currently working on her ninth commercial fiction title.
Anna started out briefly as an actress and stand-up comedian but although her heart wasn’t in performance, she revels in storytelling and shining a light in dark places. Anna’s USP is in tackling difficult subjects with understanding, empathy and humour that spills onto every page.
Series: / standalone
Pages: 341
Genre: Fiction
A poignant, charming novel about a crime that never took place, a would-be bank robber who disappears into thin air, and eight extremely anxious strangers who find they have more in common than they ever imagined
Looking at real estate isn't usually a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes a group of strangers hostage. The captives include a recently retired couple who relentlessly hunt down fixer-uppers to avoid the painful truth that they can't fix up their own marriage. There's a wealthy banker who has been too busy making money to care about anyone else and a young couple who are about to have their first child but can't seem to agree on anything, from where they want to live to how they met in the first place. Add to the mix an eighty-seven-year-old woman who has lived long enough not to be afraid of someone waving a gun in her face, a flustered but still-ready-to-make-a-deal real estate agent, and a mystery man who has locked himself in the apartment's only bathroom, and you've got the worst group of hostages in the world.
Each of them carries a lifetime of grievances, hurts, secrets, and passions that are ready to boil over. None of them is entirely who they appear to be. And all of them—the bank robber included—desperately crave some sort of rescue. As the authorities and the media surround the premises, these reluctant allies will reveal surprising truths about themselves and set in a motion a chain of events so unexpected that even they can hardly explain what happens next.
Humorous, compassionate, and wise, Anxious People is an ingeniously constructed story about the enduring power of friendship, forgiveness, and hope—the things that save us, even in the most anxious of times.
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❝They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.❞
I can't hide it anymore - I am officially a huge Backman fan! His writing is absolutely magnificent and he has a great talent for story-telling.
I've previously read two of his works - A Man called Ove and Beartown and I absolutely loved how realistically he portrayed all of the characters and the story in those two books and the way he wrote about problems and about things that aren't always easy to talk about. I expected something similar to that in this book, but I got something entirely else.
Anxious People is a story that starts quite unrealistically with very unrealistic (even absurd) characters. For the first half of the book, I didn't know where the story will take me and what I'll get out of it. I have to say I didn't really know what the message was and just couldn't really get into it, but the last half of the book, the story slowly started coming together and I connected all of the dots and had this 'oh!' moment.
I loved how Backman portrayed different problems from different people. How different people were thrown together in an unexpected and sudden way that no one could ever anticipate. We could say this story was really silly and funny, but it also dealt with modern problems and people who came out as silly and as rude idiots, but deep inside, they were all battling different battles no one really knew about.
This book was such a great and unexpected surprise because I really didn't know what to expect when I started reading it. But this is the thing with Backman - you can hardly predict how his books will play out. You always have to expect the unexpected and then some more.
Yet another book I can joyfully recommend!
Fredrik Backman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (soon to be a major motion picture starring Tom Hanks), My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, Britt-Marie Was Here, Beartown, Us Against You, as well as two novellas, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer and The Deal of a Lifetime. Things My Son Needs to Know About the World, his first work of non-fiction, will be released in the US in May 2019. His books are published in more than forty countries. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden, with his wife and two children. Connect with him on Twitter @BackmanLand or on Instagram @backmansk.
Release date: April 16th, 2019
Series: / standalone
Pages: 273
Genre: Fiction
At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school soccer team while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her housekeeping job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers - one they are determined to conceal.
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.
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I don’t know why I can’t be like normal people.
I'll admit something: I didn't expect I'd enjoy this book as much as I did because I often struggle with popular books that everyone praises - my expectations just get too high and many books don't reach them.
I didn't really love this book, but there's something about it that just pulled me in and kept me reading. It was captivating and different and I just wanted to know how Connell and Marianne's relationship will play out at the end. Let me tell you - I wasn't prepared for that.
This is also the second book in my life I've read that didn't use quotation marks for conversations and I needed some time to get used to it, but it worked and it was clear when a sentence was said out loud and when it was just a thought.
I like the whole idea of this book; about two people just looking for normalcy. Being young, you often feel lost and confused and like everyone around you has it perfectly together while this is often not the case.
It was also a different switch of Connell and Marianne's lives and seeing them adjust to the difference. Marianne is the unpopular girl at the beginning of the book with a rich family, but with no friends, because no one wants to even be seen around while Connell is more popular, more outgoing and more known and liked.
They start their secret relationship about which nobody should know about, but when at college, things change for both of them and Marianne becomes the liked and popular girl while Connell seems to lose himself a little and doesn't know how to find himself. He doesn't have any friends and is having quite a hard time.
Marianne and Connell's relationship is on and off and this book is about people leaving and returning back to your life. It's like that with some people - they leave and when they come back, it's like they've never left. With Marianne and Connell, it was like something was pulling them together, but they didn't know how to figure out how to be with each other because they just didn't know how to properly communicate.
I truly enjoyed reading this book, it was a quick and easy read, despite it dealing with tough and heavy subjects, but I think that's the magic in it.
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Sally Rooney was born in 1991 and lives in Dublin, where she graduated from Trinity College. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Dublin Review, The White Review, The Stinging Fly, and the Winter Pages anthology.
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