![]() As with most US children, my mother was more involved in my educational development than my father. ![]() As with most US children who attend public schools, the majority of my instructors were female. The scene sticks with me, I think, because so many of my earliest memories involve women teaching me to read and men assigning me things to read. When I was ten, he handed me a paperback copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (1942) and said, “All educated people know mythology.” I took the book and ran upstairs, where I immediately wrote my name and the date in ballpoint pen on the inside cover, as if the ink was an incantatory potion that would launch me to the ranks of the educated. He was a deeply kind person who saw in our Erskine Caldwell clan something worth salvaging from the fate otherwise predicted by demographics. Growing up, my family had a patron: an artist who gave us his used Dodge Dart when my mom’s job took her off a bus line and who sometimes handed me five-dollar bills at the end of his visits to our house. ![]()
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![]() Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell bring to life a sweet and spirited tale of young love that asks us to consider what happens when we ditch the toxic relationships we crave to embrace the healthy ones we need. Fortunately for Freddy, there are new friends, and the insight of advice columnists like Anna Vice to help her through being a teenager in love. ![]() However, she keeps breaking up with Frederica Riley, or Freddy, as her friends call her. Maybe it's Freddy, who is rapidly losing her friends, including Doodle, who needs her now more than ever. Laura Dean is charming, confident, and cute. But Laura Dean keeps coming back, and as their relationship spirals further out of her control, Freddy has to wonder if it's really Laura Dean that's the problem. Reeling from her latest break up, Freddy's best friend, Doodle, introduces her to the Seek-Her, a mysterious medium, who leaves Freddy some cryptic parting words: break up with her. Freddy (Frederica) is totally on the hook for Laura Dean. There's just one problem: Laura Dean is maybe not the greatest girlfriend. Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-OConnell. ![]() ![]() Laura Dean, the most popular girl in high school, was Frederica Riley's dream girl: charming, confident, and SO cute. ![]() ![]() the Gifted) and discovered some shocking news. Surprisingly, it turned out that they weren’t the only ones who had those superhuman powers during the exploration-and by “exploration,” it was more accurate to say Noah’s peripheral vision/telepathy/connection with someone who was dying-they met new Carriers (a.k.a. ![]() Since this was a spin-off series for The Mara Dyer Trilogy, the story picked up shortly after the end of The Retribution of Mara Dyer and continued Noah and Mara’s journey to further explore their supernatural gifts (Noah’s healing and Mara’s killing abilities). ![]() To begin with, The Becoming of Noah Shaw was told completely from Noah’s POV and we got to view the whole story from his perspective, which was quite refreshing for me. Even after finishing reading this book for weeks, I still feel a pang in my heart when recalling the story. May contain spoilers for Mara Dyer Trilogy. Mara Dyer is the only one he trusts with his secrets and his future.Īnd both are scared that uncovering the truth about themselves will force them apart. ![]() This is what happens after happily ever after.Įveryone thinks seventeen-year-old Noah Shaw has the world on a string. In the first book of the Shaw Confessions, the companion series to the New York Times bestselling Mara Dyer novels, old skeletons are laid bare and new promises prove deadly. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It is natural to imagine that after so many disasters Candide married, and living with the philosopher Pangloss, the philosopher Martin, the prudent Cacambo, and the old woman, having besides brought so many diamonds from the country of the ancient Incas, must have led a very happy life. This advice was well received, the old woman approved it they said not a word to his sister the thing was executed for a little money, and they had the double pleasure of entrapping a Jesuit, and punishing the pride of a German baron. Martin was for throwing the Baron into the sea Cacambo decided that it would be better to deliver him up again to the captain of the galley, after which they thought to send him back to the General Father of the Order at Rome by the first ship. Pangloss drew up an excellent memorial, wherein he proved that the Baron had no right over his sister, and that according to all the laws of the empire, she might marry Candide with her left hand. ![]() He consulted Pangloss, Martin, and the faithful Cacambo. But the extreme impertinence of the Baron determined him to conclude the match, and Cunegonde pressed him so strongly that he could not go from his word. At the bottom of his heart Candide had no wish to marry Cunegonde. ![]() ![]() Moreover, there are still many opium addicts left over from when the “Hesperians” (i.e. This second novel of the series is set in a fantasy country similar to the post-WW2 era of Chinese civil war, with most coastal cities demolished by Federation troops who slaughtered and abused tens of millions. Except now she regrets some of those actions. Protecting her people from this gives our heroine, Rin, plenty of reason to go berserker and commit abominable war crimes. ![]() The Poppy War, the first book, takes place in a world much like China during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Rape of Nanjing, and the graphic brutality of the occupying “Federation” troops (the Japanese, thinly-veiled) is grimly depicted. She sets her trilogy in a version of early twentieth century China where shamans call upon gods who give them superpowers in a literally maddening dark bargain. Kuang studies Chinese history, and more recently Chinese literature, at Oxford and Cambridge. ![]() Kuang’s The Dragon Republic has been published. Following up on my post about how fantasies set in non-Western cultures are becoming deservedly more popular, Rebecca F. ![]() ![]() ![]() Any deviation from this crushing routine - the sound of distant gunfire, a new voice in the hallway, or having his photograph taken by his captors - inflames André's imagination with thoughts of rescue, or sends him spiraling into despair. His days pass with metronomic regularity: fitful sleep broken up by the "click, clack" of the door, which augurs a meal of thin vegetable soup, or a bathroom break. We watch them storm into the room where André is sleeping, forcibly abduct the bewildered and terrified man, and shove him into the backseat of a car.įor days that stretch into weeks, and weeks into months, André's existence shrinks to one of numbing monotony, as he is kept - mostly - in a small darkened room, handcuffed to a radiator beside a bare mattress. That same, muted grayscale color-scheme will stay with us throughout the book, because the man imparting those words - Christophe André, a Doctors Without Borders administrator assigned to the Caucasus region in 1997 - will spend the bulk of Hostage's 432 pages in darkness.īut first, we see a car pull up to the building, and several dark shapes clamber out. ![]() ![]() Your purchase helps support NPR programming. ![]() Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Hostage Author Guy Delisle and Helge Dascher ![]() ![]() At work, where she leans into her natural assertiveness, Annie is a star. Eager to please her commitment-phobic boyfriend, she can't stop parsing his texts and pretending to be the easy-going, cool girl he wants. ![]() Celine is so haunted by an event in her past that she can't access the confidence she yearns to exude.Īnnie is worried about Joy's senseless devotion to Theo, but she has her own troubles. Distracted by her need to please Theo, Joy fails to see that Celine's beauty doesn't protect her from her own insecurities. Anything Celine might deny him, Joy will grant. ![]() Joy resolves to do whatever it takes to nurture the bond she and Theo have forged. Then Theo brings home Celine, the girlfriend he's never mentioned and who is possibly the most stunning woman Joy has ever seen. When Annie goes to live with her boyfriend, Theo and Joy settle into a comfortable domesticity. Struggling to make ends meet, they decide to rent their extra bedroom to Theo, who charms Joy with his salt-and-pepper hair and adoration of their one-eyed cat. ![]() Joy and Annie are friends and roommates whose thirtysomething existences aren't exactly what they'd imagined for themselves. ![]() ![]() Only then can he take possession of a man he has grown to respectĬontent warnings include: BDSM (D/s, bondage), significant size difference, sex on-page, PTSD, abuse of subordinates, forced intoxication, character gets chained to a wall. They may have laws, culture, and incompatible genitalia in their way, but Ondry knows that he can find a way to overcome all that if he can just overcome the ghosts of Liam’s past. ![]() ![]() Ondry may not understand humans, but he recognizes a wounded soul, and his need to protect Liam is quickly outpacing his common sense. This fear keeps him from noticing that the Rownt trader Ondry cares for him. Life burned that lesson into his soul from a young age. He won’t risk letting anyone come too close because he won’t risk letting anyone see his deeply submissive nature. After escaping the horrors of war, he wants a boring life. Liam loves his life as a linguist and trader on the Rownt homeworld, but he has ignored his heart and sexual needs for years. ![]() One of my favourite weird alien books, meaning it features truly alien aliens. ![]() ![]() 'Out of Africa' is considered her masterpiece. She wrote poems, plays, and stories from an early age, including 'Seven Gothic Tales', 'Winter's Tales', 'Last Tales', 'Anecdotes of Destiny', 'Shadows on the Grass' and 'Ebrengard'. Isak Dinesen (1885-1962_ was born Karen Christence Dinesen in Rungsted, Denmark. Karen Blixens Out of Africa (1937): Colonial Aesthetic and Decolonial Aisthesis. ![]() I told stories constantly to them, all kinds." Her account of her African adventures, written after she had lost her beloved farm and returned to Denmark, is that of a master storyteller, a woman whom John Updike called "one of the most picturesque and flamboyant literary personalities of the century." She had come to Kenya from Denmark with her husband, and when they separated she stayed on to manage the farm by herself, visited frequently by her lover, the big-game hunter Denys Finch-Hatton, for whom she would make up stories "like Scheherazade." In Africa, "I learned how to tell tales," she recalled many years later. ![]() ![]() 'Out of Africa' is Isak Dinesen's memoir of her years in Africa, from 1914 to 1931, on a four-thousand-acre coffee plantation in the hills near Nairobi. ![]() ![]() She wants to find the end of the curse, and discovers a lot about her past. ![]() In Passion, she visits her past lives with Bill, tricked, because he is Lucifer. In Torment, she was send to the Nephilim school, the Shoreline Academy, so she could be protected from the enemies. There she met Daniel Grigori, Arriane Alter, Gabrielle Givens, Cameron Briel, Todd Hammond, Randy, and a lot of other characters.Īt the end of the book, she discovered that some of the boys and girls in that school are angels and demons, and that Luce has been reincarnated every seventeen years. In Fallen, Luce was sent to Sword & Cross when she was suspected of being involved in an incident with a mysterious fire, killing her crush, Trevor. ![]() August 1992, in her penultimate life) is the main protagonist of the Fallen series. ![]() |