Books Via Ashley

This post is especially for white people. We need to educate ourselves on what it means to be black in the US. Beyond listening to my POC (that's People of Color) friends when they speak about the injustices and prejudices they face, and following more POC on social media to gain a broader perspective, I also read as much as I can. These are six books I think are very helpful to understanding the history and reality of black people in the United States. Fiction 1) The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas Starr witnesses her unarmed friend get shot by a police officer and decides to speak out. I think this book should be required reading in all schools. 2) Americanah   by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Ifemelu moves to the US from Nigeria and learns for the first time what it means to be "black". 3) The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead In this book, the Underground Railroad is a literal thing that helps Cora escape from slavery in Georgia. But with a slave...

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng * I received a free ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review * Publishing date: 12 Sept 2017 Synopsis "In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned - from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules. "Enter Mia Warren - an enigmatic artist and single mother - who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenaged daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community. "When old family friends of the Richardsons attempt to adopt a C...

Everything, Everything - Nicola Yoon Synopsis Madeline has a rare disease that makes her allergic to the world. She's never left her house, where she lives with her mother and spends her days reading. One day, a new boy moves in next door, they begin texting, and soon Madeline is realizing her bubble world doesn't contain everything she wanted. Review This book is along the same lines as The Fault In Our Stars , in terms of teens with illness finding love, but it's much more lighthearted. The main character, Madeline, is smart and cute, especially in her awkwardness of getting to know Olly (the boy next door). Olly starts off a bit as a manic pixie dream boy , but as the book develops we get some more depth to him too and he becomes a well-rounded character. I thought the romance was cute, even with it being a bit of an insta-romance (she's basically in love with him from when she first sees him). But the whole process of their relationship is really cha...

The Woman in Cabin 10  - Ruth Ware Synopsis Lo Blackwood, a travel journalist, has the assignment of her career: one of ten slots on the maiden voyage of the luxury passenger ship, the Aurora .  From the moment she steps on board, Lo is swept up in the plush interior and free-flowing alcohol, hob-nobbing with rich and important people. The night after departure, Lo is awoken by scream and a loud splash. She is sure she witnessed someone being thrown overboard, complete with blood smeared on the deck. And yet, when security comes, the blood is gone, and all passengers are accounted for. Lo is sure of what she saw, but as she begins to investigate, things begin to spiral out of control. Review This book is like a Hitchcock thriller, or Agatha Christie. There's a girl who disappears but no one else has seen her and no one is missing. Who was she and where could she have gone? Who is hiding something? The main character doesn't quite trust her own mind and has an...

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown - Holly Black Synopsis Tana wakes up in the morning after a wild high school party, and goes downstairs to find she’s the only one who has survived a vicious vampire attack. As she escapes, she also helps her ex-boyfriend, who has been bitten, and a young mysterious vampire. Together they drive to a Coldtown: a place where vampires and those who are bitten are quarantined in an effort to keep the epidemic contained. Non-infected people can also enter, but once you go in, it’s almost impossible to get out. Tana is determined to get out, even if that means taking on the biggest, baddest, and most powerful vampire in Coldtown. Review Vampires aren’t really my thing, but Holly Black just made it WORK in this story and reminded me how seductive, intriguing, and terrifying they can be. In this story, vampires have become an epidemic. Once bitten by a vampire, a person goes “Cold", and if they drink human blood within that time, then they die a...

Ink and Bone - Rachel Caine Book 1 of the Great Library series Synopsis What if the Great Library of Alexandria had never been destroyed? In Jess Brightwell's world, it hasn't. Independent and above any nationality or people, the Library is present in every city around the world and rules all knowledge that's given to the people. Through Alchemy, information can be shared, but private ownership of books is forbidden. Jess comes from a family that runs a thriving black market book business. He is sent by his family to train to be in the library's service, but soon finds his loyalties tested, and comes to find that the Library has secrets of its own. Review I really enjoyed this book. I love books and libraries and alternate histories, and this has all three. In any good alternate history, the world-building has to be fantastic, and in this case it really was. It was interesting to see how the library's dominance and technology had changed the cours...

This Savage Song - Victoria Schwab Review: The newest book by one of my favorite authors, V.E. Schwab (She goes by "Victoria" for her YA novels). I love the premise for the book: violent acts create actual monsters. The two main characters are a human girl named Kate who desperately wants to be a (figurative) monster: a big, bad crime boss like her father, who runs one half of V-City. The other is August, who is a literal monster, a Malchai, one that drains the souls of his victims through his music, who desperately seeks his own personal humanity. I loved them both, and their personalities and characters and drives are so multi-faceted and real. They interact with other characters in believable and different ways. The juxtaposition of these two characters in and of itself is one of the driving things behind this story, and one of the things that makes it so compelling. Even though marketed as a YA, it really delves into the deep questions: What makes us human? W...

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett Synopsis Bulikov was once the city at the center of the most powerful nation on earth, a nation given power by their gods. But then those Divines were killed, and now the tables have turned.  The once great Continent has fallen to poverty and disease, its very reality broken, while the once oppressed Saypuri rule over them. Shara Thivani comes to the city as an unimposing junior diplomat, but secretly she's a covert agent sent to investigate the murder of an esteemed colleague. As she digs through the unrest that boils under the surface of the city, she discovers tangled webs of rebellious plots, and indications that the gods may not all be as dead as they had thought. Review What a book! Bennett's easy prose drew me right into the story. His characters were very relaxed and human, the dialogue subtly humorous. The pacing was very well done, keeping me engaged even while the characters are doing mundane things. Interspersed ...

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff Synopsis Mathilde and Lotto elope after only five weeks of dating. The book covers the course of their marriage and the secrets that keep it alive. Review This book won many "Book of the Year" awards, plus was President Obama's favorite book of 2015. I like reading books that get a lot of attention like this, since often they're fairly decent books. However, this book was definitely not among my favorites, nor even close. I felt like this book pretentiously sells itself on the discussion and examination of abstract values and emotions, like "art", "creativity", "love" through flawed and hyper-"realistic" characters, but lacks actual substance. Lotto is an arrogant playboy who has slept with every girl he can get his hands on, and an aspiring actor who isn't a very good actor at all. But instead of doing something else, he sits around for seven years while Mathilde keeps their ...

Wolf by Wolf by Ryan Graudin Synopsis It's 1956, and Hitler won WWII. Every year, the Axis powers (the Third Reich and Imperial Japan) hold a motorcycle race across the two continents. The victor gets to attend a fancy ball in Tokyo and have a meeting with the Führer himself. Enter Yael, a Jew whose time in a concentration camp as a medical experiment left her with the ability to skinshift. Her goal? Win the race and kill Hitler. To enter the race, she poses as the previous year's winner, Adele Wolfe. But things prove even more challenging when Adele's brother enters the race, and Yael finds out that Adele had secrets of her own. Review I love books that take history and say "What if..." and create an entirely new sequence of events. I think the events surrounding WWII are especially interesting due to the enormous impact the war and the outcome had on the world. I had been eagerly waiting to read this book since it came out in October and I was not d...

The Little Paris Bookshop - Nina George Synopsis Jean Perdu owns a "literary apothecary", a floating bookstore where he prescribes books to help people with their various life ailments. The only person he can't seem to heal is himself. Twenty years after the love of his life left him, Perdu finally opens the last letter she wrote him... And discovers something that sets him off on a journey of renewal to the south of France. He is joined by a young successful author who is trying to escape his newfound fame, an Italian cook, and they meet several other people along the way. Review Reading this book was like eating a delicious chocolate torte: savoring each bite and letting the rich, satisfying taste linger before taking another. I read this book slowly, enjoying the beautiful words and exquisite sentences. Plus, SO MANY FEELS. This book really delves into love, loss, and all the stages of grief in between. These emotions are described so poignantly that yo...

It's Halloween this week! One of my favorite holidays! Something you should know about me is that I HATE being scared. As a child I was scared of everything (I think it comes from having an overactive imagination). I've gotten better as I've gotten older, but I still refuse to go to haunted houses, I hate horror movies, and things that shouldn't scare me will creep me out. I have yet to read some truly horrifying books like those by Stephen King because I know I can't handle it. So if you're like me, I've managed to find some books that are just creepy enough to enjoy, but not too scary! 1) I Am Not A Serial Killer - Dan Wells John Cleaver is a teenager and sociopath who works in the morgue with his mom. He is also obsessed with serial killers. He recognizes that he has many of the traits himself, so he lives by a strict set of rules to keep the "monster" caged inside. But his knowledge of serial killers helps him recognize somethin...

The Girl On The Train - Paula Hawkins Synopsis Rachel, a recently divorced alcoholic, takes the same train into London every day. Even when she gets fired, she keeps her daily commute so her landlord/roommate won't know. Every day, she passes the same set of houses--one of them her ex's and his new wife.  There is another house that sticks out, just down the street. A young couple lives there, and every day as she passes them, Rachel feels like she comes to know them.  She makes up names for them, creates backstories, etc. But then one day she sees something that isn't right. Her observation gets her caught up in a dangerous police investigation and tangled up in the intimate details of other people's lives. Review This was a HUGE best-selling thriller earlier this year, and one of the most reviewed books on Amazon. I read it in about a day. This book was mainly told from the viewpoint of three complex women: Rachel, Anna, and Megan. Rachel is the main p...

1)  The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Disappeared  - Jonas Jonasson Centenarian Allan Karlsson has ended up in a nursing home after a very long and eventful life. But on his 100th birthday, Allan decides he still has a lot to live for and escapes out the window in his bedroom slippers. A series of zany events follows, involving a suitcase of stolen money, angry criminals, new friends, and an elephant. But this isn't Allan's only crazy adventure. The book talks about his crazy life, his fondness for explosives, and his ability to be in the right place at the right time. Not only has he seen some of the key events in the last century, but he may have been the one behind them. This book was wacky and fun to read, with lots of laugh out loud moments. The book was written originally in Swedish and translated into English, giving it a unique voice. 2)  The Unlikely Pilgramage of Harold Fry  - Rachel Joyce Harold Fry, recently retired, l...

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore - Robin Sloan Synopsis In the recent recession, Clay Jannon is out of a job, until he stumbles across a 'Help Wanted' sign in the window of an unusual bookstore, owned by the kind yet mysterious Mr. Penumbra. Clay is hired for the nightshift in the store, and it's clear that it's a front for something else--strange customers come in to the store at all hours of the night, urgently requesting to check out some of the store's unique volumes. Clay decides to get to the bottom of what's going on. Enlisting the help of his friends, their investigation leads them on a wild adventure to solve a mystery that's hundreds of years old. Review The plot is extremely compelling, but lighthearted--it doesn't take itself too seriously. I really didn't know what to expect when I picked up this book--I had seen it was popular and looked interesting. But after the first couple pages I was hooked and in for a fun adventur...

The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Gailbraith (aka J.K. Rowling) Synopsis Cormoran Strike is a private investigator barely making ends meet and is now living in his office after a final breakup with his ex-fiancée. Enter John Bristowe, a childhood friend who asks Cormoran to look into the death of his supermodel sister, Lula Landry, from a few months back. The police ruled it as a suicide, but there are hints that it was not. Following the case, Cormoran is plunged into the world of supermodels, rockstars, and the fabulously wealthy as he seeks to expose the dark underbelly of that glittering world.  Review If you're looking for Harry Potter, don't bother with this book. However, for what it was (a crime/detective novel), it was good. Not great, but good. The characters had some depth, though at times it ran on cliché (rough but brilliant detective in a dingy office with a female secretary, etc). I felt like the main character maybe had too many crazy de...

There's a trending hashtag on Twitter among authors and literary folks called #DiversityInBooks, promoting the reading of books by authors or about characters who are from a diverse set of ethnic or racial groups (aka: not white). Personally, I love it and always have enjoyed reading about people and cultures and situations that are completely different from mine. I think that by doing so, we create better understanding among each other as human beings. Diversity should unite us, not divide us. Here are three books that I found that are not only written by minority authors with minority main characters, but actually discuss what race is and what it means in the US today. Everything I Never Told You - Celeste Ng This novel, set in the 1970s in small-town Ohio, shows the struggles of the Lee family after the sudden death of their teenage daughter, Lydia. Unsure if it was murder or suicide, the book slowly reveals backstories for each of the characters until we find out what ...

BBC's Pride and Prejudice mini-series turned 20 years old today! One of my mother's favorite books was Pride and Prejudice, and she passed that love onto me. Jane Austen was not only a talented and witty writer, but she captured the different social aspects of the time (the balls, the etiquette, and the romance) and provided comedic commentary. She also created unique, clever, and memorable female characters in an age where women were not at the forefront. For those of you who love Jane Austen and all things Regency, here are five books that you are sure to enjoy. 1) Austenland - Shannon Hale At 32, Jane is obsessed with everything Austen, but especially Mr. Darcy. Unfortunately, that has had repercussions on her real-life relationships. Then her elderly relative provides a three-week vacation to Pembroke Park, a discreet British resort where guests live like they're in an Austen novel. Jane vows that she will go as one final hurrah, and afterwards leave her ...

Ungodly by Kendare Blake Ungodly  is the final installment of The Goddess War trilogy. I was lucky enough to win an Advanced Reader's Copy. This book comes out TODAY! (Sept 22, 2015). ( Warning: Minor spoilers ahead. I would HIGHLY recommend the rest of the trilogy, beginning with Antigoddess) Synopsis The gods of Olympus are dying, and now they're at war with each other. Athena is determined to find a way to stop it. In Antigoddess , her search leads her to Cassandra, a human, who holds a special power that can determine the final outcome. In Mortal Gods , they finally find the source for the weird and unique illnesses that are killing the gods. But disaster and betrayal strike, and Athena and her gang of gods and mortals are split up. In Ungodly , Athena and Odysseus have to battle through the underworld to escape back to life.  Cassandra is literally chasing down Death (the god of it, that is) to aid her. The rest of the gang--Henry, Andie, Hermes-...