Tag: Book Reviews

I used to tell myself I hated happy endings. That I, like April, would be better off walking away before I knew the turnout of a would-have-been chapter of my own life.

Of course, my life isn’t a book and my story doesn’t have a conclusion the way April’s does. But I suppose books like The People We Keep are, among so many other wonders, a reminder that even though our lives take sharp turns and the world often crashes down around us and it seems nothing could ever turn out right, eventually at least one thing always does.

But Allison Larkin’s novel is more than a reminder: It’s a promise. Perhaps you haven’t been through everything April has. I haven’t. But we all have something. We all want better, even when we deprive ourselves of everything that could get us there.

What would you do — how far would you go — to save the person you loved most in the world?

In The Dead and the Dark, Courtney Gould paints a chilling picture of an imperfect family who must depend on each other now more than ever.

Logan, the daughter of celebrity ghost-hunter dads, wants nothing to do with small towns, ghosts, or worst of all, her parents. Watching them detect paranormal activity in front of cameras was never the life she signed up for, and she wants out.

So why has she found herself in a town full of ghosts?

How many times have you been told you couldn’t do something because of who you are?

Marian Graves is a woman with a dream. But it’s the early 20th century, a time in which women with ambitions had no choice but to fight to transform their hopes into realities.

When she first expresses interest in learning to fly planes, Marian meets a level of resistance that would convince even the strongest-willed to give up and settle for more “appropriate” work.

Marian Graves did not give up.

In fact, she persevered so intensely that decades later, the book’s second main character accepts the job of playing her in a biopic about her disappearance.

If you were told you were destined for nothing, what would you do to prove your prophecy false?

Shelley Parker-Chan’s new release She Who Became the Sun begins with destiny at its forefront. A fortune-teller stands over two siblings, a brother and his sister. The boy is promised greatness; the girl, nothing at all.

Then the boy dies. And instead of letting herself waste away into the nothingness the world set up for her, she takes on the identify of Zhu, joins a monastery, and vows to achieve the greatness her brother never would.

She has no idea what achieving greatness will truly ask of her until everything goes wrong.