5/29/2023 0 Comments Twisted pride cora reilly series![]() ![]() “Are you ignoring me?” Remo asked from close behind me, and a small shiver shot down my spine. Two families that will never be the same. A woman intent on bringing a monster to his knees. A ruthless man on a quest to destroy the Outfit by breaking someone they are supposed to protect. Yet, even in the hands of the cruelest man she knows, she is determined to cling to her pride, and Remo soon understands that the woman at his mercy might not be as easy to break as he thought. ![]() ![]() Serafina is the niece of the Boss of the Outfit, and her hand has been promised in marriage for years, but kidnapped in her wedding dress on her way to church by Remo, Serafina quickly realizes that she can’t hope for saving. A wedding is sacred, stealing a bride sacrilegious. As Capo of the Camorra he rules with a brutal hand over his territory – a territory the Chicago Outfit breached. ![]()
0 Comments
5/29/2023 0 Comments Diana abu jaber books![]() ![]() Now things are falling into chaos and danger. ![]() From Dorsom, she begins to learn how to communicate without words, and about this strange land where the Flickers, beings of color and light, once lived in balance with the Shadows, their opposite. There she meets Dorsom, a strange but friendly Flicker, who looks like a human boy except for his skin, which is green. When Sami reads the spell, she passes through the mirror, into Silverworld, a land full of marvels. On the same page is a picture of a mirror identical to the one in Sami's room, another treasure from Teta's old life. At first the pages and the words are slippery, but at last the book lets her read a spell- for the Opening of thee Silversinn'd. Sami is distraught, and in a desperate effort to find a way to keep Teta home, she opens the old book with a cracked cover Teta had brought with her from Lebanon, a forbidden book she's been told has great and magical powers. But Sami is the only one in the family who can hear her grandmother talk to everyone else, Teta sounds like she's speaking gibberish, and so her mother thinks it would be best to find a nursing home for her. Silverwood, by Diana Abu-Jaber (Crown Books, March 17, 2020), is an engaging portal fantasy given extra richness by the Lebanese heritage of the main character.Īfter apruptly being moved to Florida, Sami is on edge spending time talking to her beloved grandmother, who lives with her family, has become her bedrock. ![]() ![]() ![]() She later began working as an advertising copywriter for many of Detroit's department stores. Lilian Jackson Braun began her writing career as a teenager, contributing sports poetry for the Detroit News. Many also believe that the culture and history of the Upper peninsula of Michigan are represented in the series as well, which is quite possible as it is indeed a fictitious location. The Cat Who books center around the life of former newspaper reporter James Qwilleran, and his two Siamese cats, KoKo and Yum Yum in the fictitious small town of Pickax located in Moose County, "400 miles north of everywhere." Although never formally stated in the books, the towns, counties and lifestyles described in the series are generally accepted to be a modeled after Bad Axe, Michigan (located in the "Michigan Thumb") where she resided with her husband for many years until the mid 1980's. ![]() She is well-known for her light-hearted series of The Cat Who. ![]() Lilian Jackson Braun was an American writer. ![]() 5/29/2023 0 Comments Amin maalouf origins![]() A journey well worth taking, an elegant meditation on mortality and our relationship to the past.” - The Washington Post ![]() “This memoir illuminates the way we make narrative out of pieces of fact and rumor and also serves as a revealing glimpse into the complexities of a part of the world to which nationhood came late and where borders remain unusually porous and slippery. ![]() Origins is at once a gripping family chronicle and a timely consideration of Lebanese culture and politics. But he never loses track of his story's central thread: his quest to lift the shadow of legend from his family's past. He moves with great agility across time and space, and across genres of writing. Maalouf is an energetic and amiable narrator, illuminating the more obscure corners of late Ottoman nationalism, the psychology of Lebanese sectarianism, and the dynamics of family quarrels. ![]() Why did Boutros, a poet and educator in Lebanon, travel across the globe to rescue his younger brother, Gebrayel, who had settled in Havana? Set during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth, in the mountains of Lebanon and in Havana, Cuba, Origins recounts the family history of the generation of Maalouf's paternal grandfather, Boutros. Origins, by the world-renowned writer Amin Maalouf, is a sprawling, hemisphere-spanning intergenerational saga. ![]() ![]() The last thing Libby needs is to get sidetracked by a superstar jock. Aidan always gets what he wants and Libby is the final home run he wants to hit out of the park. As the closing pitcher on the best baseball team in the Big Ten, he’s on his way to the major leagues. Aidan Palowski is one of those jocks your friends warned you about–the kind that never loose–the kind that put notches in their baseball bats. During a night on the town, Libby beats the most competitive athlete on campus at pool and draws more attention from him than she’s prepared for. But admission to law school is Libby’s ticket out of Indiana and her escape from small town life forever. ![]() Libby Tucker is a cutter–a nobody waitress in a college town–at least that’s what everyone believes. Love at first sight versus lust you can’t fight. ![]() Jocks (Chicago #1) PDF EPUB full Download at the bottom. Jocks (Chicago #1) written by Elizabeth Marx which was published in November 7th 2011. Here is a quick description and cover image of book Cutters vs. ![]() 5/29/2023 0 Comments Book big friendship![]() ![]() ![]() It’s a little weird for the first few pages, but once they explain why they decided to use this particular device, I was more comfortable with it and completely forgot about it as I kept reading. The only negative (and I can’t really call it that, to be honest) is the way Aminatou and Ann refer to themselves throughout the book. The book is an easy read, so it shouldn’t take long for readers to get into it. No sugar-coated nonsense, but honesty that sometimes put them both in a bad light. ![]() Many of us who listen to the podcast think of Aminatou and Ann as “friendship goals,” but they give us the real deal, which I appreciated. What I love about this book is how honest they were about their feelings and what they did to keep the friendship from falling apart completely. In Big Friendship, the two “long-distance besties” talk about how they met, how their friendship grew and what happened when things started going wrong. ![]() Not just theirs, everyone’s friendships and what it means to keep, nurture and sometimes let go of them. Two of my podcast faves, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, have written a book on friendship. ![]() 5/28/2023 0 Comments Clap when you land yahaira![]() ![]() This double-life reminds Yahaira of the squares on the chessboard: each box separate, rigidly containing itself so that nothing bleeds out into the next square. Yahaira Rios lives in New York with her parents, and asks every year if she. ![]() The plane ride between the two places was the demarcation line between his two selves- two lives that never intersected in his lifetime. Elizabeth Acevedo's new Clap When You Land is a novel, in verse, about two sisters losing their father, their hero. Each year, he’d spend the summer in the DR, and would then return for the rest of the year to New York. She accidentally discovers that her father led a clandestine life in the Dominican Republic with a second wife and a daughter. For chess-master Yahaira in New York, the secrets of her father’s life threaten to suffocate her. But this time, on the day when his plane is supposed to land, Camino arrives at the airport to see crowds of crying people. For Camino in the Dominican Republic, her father’s death brings not only grief but a financial ticking time bomb it’s only a matter of time before she and her Tia run out of money and Camino’s dream of becoming a doctor fades away. ![]() Camino and Yahaira don’t know each other, but they share a father and they share the excruciating pain of losing him in a plane crash. Written in Acevedo’s effortless verse, Clap When You Land follows two sisters, separated by hundreds of miles and decades of secrets. Clap When You Land is Elizabeth Acevedo’s fourth book but my first experience reading her. ![]() 5/28/2023 0 Comments Pushkin and the queen of spades![]() The Russian novelist was also fascinated by the writings of Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Walter Scott, William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, and Diderot. Dostoevsky was a devoted reader who spoke highly of Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, and Leo Tolstoy. He said he admired the novel ‘Oblomov’ by Ivan Goncharov, and would strongly recommend reading Leo Tolstoy's ‘War and Peace’. ![]() READ MORE: 5 reasons why Dostoevsky is SO greatĭostoevsky often mentioned his favorite authors in his letters and notes. The man behind ‘The Idiot’ introduced them to the Bible through a book that he himself first read as a boy – ‘One hundred and twenty-four stories from the Old and New Testaments.’ Just like his father, Fyodor Dostoevsky read the Russian and European classics aloud to his children. There was a tradition of public book readings in Dostoevsky’s family. It’s a two-way street, and Dostoevsky had his own literary preferences as a writer just as well. ![]() ![]() Portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky, by Konstantin Vasilyev. ![]() 5/28/2023 0 Comments Small things like these book![]() Now approaching middle age, with five daughters of his own, he knows that he has been lucky, but also that something sets him apart from those around him - even his steady, capable and loving wife. But though he has little time for contemplation, his mind returns to his childhood, in which the kindness of the Protestant woman for whom his mother worked as a housekeeper, saved him - a child born out of wedlock, father unknown - from an uncertain and precarious future. It is a few days before Christmas in 1985, and Bill Furlong, a coal-and-timber merchant, is hard pressed, working around the clock in bitter weather to make sure that fuel is delivered before the holiday. Yet in other respects the life it describes is familiar, and the Wexford town of New Ross, dominated by the River Barrow and governed by the rhythms of work and family, is representative of life as it is still lived outside the country’s major population centres. ![]() This is Ireland before the boom and bust of the Celtic Tiger before the insidious, everyday power of the Catholic church began to be eroded by the exposure of multiple abuse scandals before its population voted overwhelmingly in favour of marriage equality and access to abortion. ![]() Claire Keegan’s tiny, cataclysmic novel takes us into the heart of small-town Ireland a few decades ago, creating a world that feels in certain respects dead and buried but whose legacy the country is still processing. ![]() 5/28/2023 0 Comments Epic Fail by Cristy Watson![]() (One often thinks, for example, of Gaskell’s North and South and her positing of the Captain of Industry as a new type of figure, one that could save England from its lack of leadership and general malaise.)įast forward over 100 years, and we have a similar sort of thing happening in the North American YA market. These writers fictionally examined a social problem and sometimes even put forth a solution to that problem. Kenzie has avoided me for two years.īack in Victorian England, there were a group of writers who worked within the “social novel”, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and other more minor writers. And who knows, maybe Kenzie and I might be friends again? I hope Kenzie uses the photo to take down Cam. Of course, Seth is at the top of the list. Seth and his twisted buddies still tally points for getting grade 9 girls to have sex with them, and for photos they get their “girlfriends" to post. ![]() And what my brother did, because he planned the contest and the party. She can use it to prove to everyone what Cam did. Just as I am about to hit delete, the Snapchat image disappears….If Kenzie saw the photo, she could take a screenshot and save it. ![]() To make sure that bastard Cam pays this time. My hands are sweaty, making it hard to hang onto the phone. It must have been taken at the party that night two years ago. I grab the phone off the floor and look at the screen. ![]() |