Month: October 2017

History, intrigue, magic, war, spies, lessons, rain, and rooks: these are the things that abound in this amazing book by Janet Fox.  I am not sure what I was expecting from this book but it was not at all what I expected. It was exponentially better.  Listening to the audiobook on Overdrive made the experience so much creepier because there was no way to skip ahead and find out what was going to happen.  This audio book kept me guessing and it was a joy to listen to (just not in the dark before bed).

 

“Keep calm and carry on.”  That’s what Katherine Bateson’s father told her, and that’s what she’s trying to do:  when her father goes off to the war, when her mother sends Kat and her brother and sister away from London to escape the incessant bombing, even when the children arrive at Rookskill Castle, an ancient, crumbling manor on the misty Scottish highlands.

But it’s hard to keep calm in the strange castle that seems haunted by ghosts or worse.  What’s making those terrifying screeches and groans at night?  Why do the castle’s walls seem to have a mind of their own?  And why do people seem to mysteriously appear and disappear?

Kat believes she knows the answer: Lady Eleanor, who rules Rookskill Castle, is harboring a Nazi spy. But when her classmates begin to vanish, one by one, Kat must uncover the truth about what the castle actually harbors—and who Lady Eleanor really is—before it’s too late.

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A gorgeously told novel in verse written with intimacy and power, Audacity is inspired by the real-life story of Clara Lemlich, a spirited young woman who emigrated from Russia to New York at the turn of the twentieth century and fought tenaciously for equal rights. Bucking the norms of both her traditional Jewish family and societal conventions, Clara refuses to accept substandard working conditions in the factories on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. For years, Clara devotes herself to the labor fight, speaking up for those who suffer in silence. In time, Clara convinces the women in the factories to strike, organize, and unionize, culminating in the famous Uprising of the 20,000.

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Powerful, breathtaking, and inspiring, Audacity is the story of a remarkable young woman, whose passion and selfless devotion to her cause changed the world.

Loved every moment of this fast paced, novel in verse.

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I think the theme I have found in many of the books I have been drawn to recently is, ‘What makes us who we are?” And while we wish it was completely left up to our dreams and goals for ourselves, most of what makes us who were are or will become is determined by our surroundings and the experiences that happen to us in those surroundings.  A look at the Queen of Hearts before she became queen, is a book that I thought would be pretty straight forward. She was evil to begin with and remained evil until the end. However, that is not the story that Marissa Meyer found when she began her journey into Wonderland. This look into the journey of becoming The Queen of Hearts is an adventure packed  story that we all thought we already knew.

 

Long before she was the terror of Wonderland, she was just a girl who wanted to fall in love.

Catherine may be one of the most desired girls in Wonderland, and a favorite of the unmarried King of Hearts, but her interests lie elsewhere. A talented baker, all she wants is to open a shop with her best friend. But according to her mother, such a goal is unthinkable for the young woman who could be the next queen.

Then Cath meets Jest, the handsome and mysterious court joker. For the first time, she feels the pull of true attraction. At the risk of offending the king and infuriating her parents, she and Jest enter into an intense, secret courtship. Cath is determined to define her own destiny and fall in love on her terms. But in a land thriving with magic, madness, and monsters, fate has other plans.

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Jack the Ripper, Phossy Jaw, and the Elephant Man may seem like sadistic carnival attractions from the past but they are not. However, they are bits and pieces of history that center around a singular time period. A time period that Matthew J. Kirby began to research and then decided that by a not so distant stretch of his imagination, these people and situations could have intertwined within each other’s lives.  Out of this brilliant feat of imagination comes a ghost story that is drenched in historical fact and dipped in narrative fiction. I hope you will check out and enjoy Kirby’s A Taste for Monsters.

London 1888, and Jack the Ripper is terrorizing the people of the city. Evelyn, a young woman disfigured by her dangerous work in a matchstick factory with nowhere to go, does not know what to make of her new position as a maid to the Elephant Man in London Hospital. Evelyn wanted to be locked away from the world, like he is, shut away from the filth and dangers of the streets. But in Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, she finds a gentle kindred, who does not recoil from her, and who understands her pain.

When the murders begin, however, Joseph and Evelyn are haunted nightly by the ghosts of the Ripper’s dead, setting Evelyn on a path to facing her fears and uncovering humanity’s worst nightmares, in which the real monsters are men.

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