![]() ![]() Let’s start with the one good point of this book, shall we? This is going to be a short one. Just wait until you get to the ending though… And like the cop in this story, you have to deal with all of that AND Ella’s paranoia. You get the drama between Anna’s families and her best friend’s. Her best friend is almost always in a hospital. The rest of the story basically tells you what life has been like for Ella and for the loved ones of Anna after she went missing… That’s about it. The next day, Anna Ballard goes missing and Ella drowns in her own guilt for not doing something a concerned grown-up should have done. Not the kind of crowd two teenage girls should be hanging out with. Thanks to Ella’s eavesdropping, we learn that the two girls, Anna Ballard and her best friend whose name I keep forgetting, were on their way to London and that the two guys with them just got out of prison. ![]() ![]() “I Am Watching You” begins with the main protagonist, Ella Longfield, who was on a train where she overhears a couple of teens flirting with one another. Here’s How I Would Summarize The Book (Spoiler-Free) ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() or they could end up trapped on the wrong side of the Brig o' Doonforever in a world that is quickly becoming a nightmare. The two girls could have all they've longed for. But Doon has a dark secret that threatens everything. Doon seems like a real-life fairy tale, complete with one prince who has eyes for Mackenna and another who looks suspiciously like the blond, kilted boy from Veronica's visions. ![]() When Veronica and Mackenna settle into their cottage in Alloway, they uncover a strange set of rings and a very unnerving letter from Mackenna's great aunt-and when the girls test the instructions Aunt Gracie left behind, they find themselves transported to a land that defies explanation. But the Scottish countryside holds other plans. When her best friend, Mackenna, invites her to spend the summer in Scotland, Veronica jumps at the opportunity to leave her complicated life behind for a few months. But one thing leads to the next as the girls discover the enchanted world of Doon, and the curse that is tearing it apart. ![]() Haunted by waking visions of a blond boy in a kilt, Veronica can't decide if she's more eager to flee her recent messy breakup or join her best friend on a trip to Scotland in hopes of finding a real-life version of her imaginary Highland crush. ![]() ![]() ![]() I will keep my thoughts on my first read intact for newcomers to the series, and I will also elaborate on why things worked so much better on reread. This review will be different and longer than usual. And just from reading Theft of Swords, the first omnibus in The Riyria Revelations, I can already confirm the accuracy of my prediction. After I finished the first two books in The Riyria Chronicles, I immediately knew I MUST read The Riyria Revelations again because I knew that my experience of it will be improved significantly. And I ended up reading through The Riyria Chronicles, the prequel series to The Riyria Revelations, which I enjoyed immensely. Last year, out of nowhere, I suddenly missed Royce, Hadrian, and the characters of The Riyria Revelations. It’s been five years (January 2017) since I first read through The Riyria Revelations, and I honestly didn’t expect I would ever read through this series again. Series: The Riyria Revelations (Book #1-2 of 6) ![]() ![]() Frank conducts research into his family history and Claire goes plant-gathering near standing stones on the hill of Craigh na Dun. In 1946, after working apart during the Second World War, former British Army nurse Claire Randall and her husband Frank Randall, a history professor, go on a second honeymoon to Inverness, Scotland. ![]() The first book won a Romance Writers of America's RITA Award in 1992. The television adaptation of the series premiered on Starz in the US on August 9, 2014.Ī mix of several genres, the series has elements of historical fiction, romance, adventure and traditional fantasy. It is the first novel in the Outlander series, with ten books planned. ![]() Initially set around the time of the Second World War, it focuses on nurse Claire Beauchamp, who travels through time to 18th-century Scotland, where she finds adventure and romance with the dashing Jamie Fraser. Outlander (published in the United Kingdom as Cross Stitch) is a historical fantasy novel by Diana Gabaldon first published in 1991. ![]() ![]() Which is, incidentally, what our Monk and Robot duo-Dex and Mosscap-have found in each other. I love the author's unerring talent for capturing hard feelings with unexpected words, how sometimes Chambers would quietly unload on the page a line so powerful, so devastating, that it would press the breath from my lungs: “ How am I supposed to tell people they’re good enough as they are when I don’t think I am?” These have quickly become my favorite moments, when reading begins to feel like overhearing a confession, a pouring out of inarticulable truths that can only emerge when you finally find someone with whom you can just sit on the ground and breathe. Becky Chambers is fantastic at expressing so precisely things I can talk about endlessly: like the transformative power of love and queer community, the beauty and strangeness of how we eke meaning out of our surroundings, and how joy and beauty can sometimes be so mundane that, in that simplicity, they become utterly radical. ![]() There is something in these books that goes right to the heart of things. ![]() The dedication for the first book states, “ For anybody who could use a break,” and for this book it reads, “ For anybody who doesn’t know where they’re going.” It must be said that half the joy of reading this series is one of a promise kept. ![]() ![]() ![]() On the walls hang paintings of a mysterious bejeweled woman and King Leopold II of Belgium. The table where she writes overlooks woods dotted with snow-covered pines ideally suited for concealing a corpse. Penny, 59, said with a devilish laugh from her cozy, art-filled home in Knowlton, the Eastern Townships village where she lives and that inspired Three Pines, the fictional setting of her 13 books. “I am a killing machine but a happy one - I get all my resentments out in my books,” Ms. ![]() She has bashed a prior in the head with an iron door knocker at a cloistered monastery electrocuted a deeply unpopular socialite on the ice during a curling tournament and literally frightened someone to death at a séance. ![]() In her murder plots, bad things happen in placid Canadian territory. KNOWLTON, Quebec - Louise Penny, the unfailingly cheery detective writer, is a ruthless killer. ![]() ![]() Obviously, this is an outstanding novel, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize - and for me it’s also a personal book, reminding me of why a little corner of my heart is still angry and broken. The novel also resonates with our own very recent times when disease, too, became political, and as a result covid-19 was a worse disaster than it needed to be. ![]() ![]() One bit of reality: the novel mentions “the Unitarian place … a gay-friendly church right off Broadway, and thus - recently - Funeral Central.” This is my church now, Second Unitarian Church, and we’re still proud of the support we could provide when it was needed. While many of the details, like the people, are fictional, some of them are real. Rebecca Makkai captures those emotions and the dreadful toll. I remember how the disease was used to attack and condemn gay men. I remember the anger, fear, and loss of so many people in the early years of AIDS. Part of the novel takes place in the gay community in Chicago in 1985, part of it in 2015 among survivors. I was covering AIDS as a newspaper reporter in Milwaukee during the 1980s, and this book brought back searing memories. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The novel is classified under the Romantic genre and further classified as Dark Romanticism and Dystopian Fiction. We offer a useful The Scarlet Letter Study Guide for students and teachers. Illustration at right by Mary Hallock Foote, 1878. Hawthorne is at his best as he treats with the complexities of sin and redemption as the story progresses and carries Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale and Pearl toward their respective destinies. ![]() In this story, the consequences of Hester Prynne's adulterous affair with the reverend Arthur Dimmesdale are borne out as she gives birth to their child and is forced to wear a Scarlet Letter A, embroidered on her bosom, as a sign of her adultery. This classic novel from the cannon of American Literature exemplifies the genre of Dark Romanticism. The short list of great American novels is often topped by Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. ![]() ![]() ![]() The performance as a whole! Her narrating the story made it very hard to listen to. What didn’t you like about Talmadge Ragan’s performance? The way they finally began trusting each other and shared their secrets and it only drew them closer. The love story was beautiful, how it blossomed over time. But listening to Talmadge Ragan read the book caused me to want to throw my hand up and just loose a credit and stop listening. Not because the book was boring, IT'S A GREAT READ. What i like least about the book is that it felt as if the book just kept going on, and on, and on and on. The way she comforts Morgan when he tells her of his past and she takes him into her arms and loves him even more. Jane and Morgans love for each other is beautiful. ![]() The way she took hold of the changes and soared. Jane handles the change from her old life to her new life smoothly. ![]() I enjoyed the characters and their all written wonderfully. What did you like best about In Want of a Wife? What did you like least? ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() I don’t know the tropes it relies on, or revises I don’t know the history it incorporates, or appropriates I don’t know the landscape its story moves across I don’t know what other literary characters, if any, keep company with Mattie Ross or Rooster Cogburn or Lucky Ned Pepper. When I tell you that the closest thing to a Western I’d read before True Grit was No Country for Old Men, you’ll understand how unprepared I was for Portis’s strange, surprising, action-packed yet character-driven novel. I can get all the talk I need and more at the Monarch boarding house.” They told me you had grit and that is why I came to you. I know you can drink whiskey and I have seen you kill a gray rat. All I have heard out of you so far is talk. I aim to get Tom Chaney and if you are not game I will find somebody who is game. You told me what your price for the job was and I have come up with it. I said, “I have left off crying, and giggling as well. ![]() |