Book Review - Hide by Kiersten White

Hide by Kiersten White
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

 Synopsis: A high-stakes hide-and-seek competition turns deadly in this dark thriller from New York Times bestselling author Kiersten White.

The challenge: spend a week hiding in an abandoned amusement park and don’t get caught.

The prize: enough money to change everything.

Even though everyone is desperate to win—to seize their dream futures or escape their haunting pasts—Mack feels sure that she can beat her competitors. All she has to do is hide, and she’s an expert at that.

It’s the reason she’s alive, and her family isn’t.

But as the people around her begin disappearing one by one, Mack realizes this competition is more sinister than even she imagined, and that together might be the only way to survive.

Fourteen competitors. Seven days. Everywhere to hide, but nowhere to run.

Come out, come out, wherever you are.

 

My Thoughts: Not as good as I thought it would be but still it was alright. My biggest issue with it was it had way to many characters to try to keep up with. I started to make a list of them just to keep them apart but some weren't in the story long enough to even be bothered with so I ditched the list and just kept reading.

View all my reviews

Book Review - The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Synopsis:  The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette’s brilliant and charismatic father captured his children’s imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn’t want the responsibility of raising a family.

The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another and eventually found their way to New York. Their parents followed them, choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered.

 My Thoughts: I usually don't read much non-fiction or memoirs but as this one has been on my bookshelf for so very long and the opportunity arose for me to read it for a reading challenge I decided to jump on it and wow it was so very interesting observing Jeannette's life and bringing up.

My heart poured open for her and her siblings as it was a daily task for survival for them... never knowing where or if they would have a next meal or where they would be sleeping from night to night. She tells us stories of her alcoholic father and a mother who pretty much only cared about art supplies over caring for her family.

I was happy with the way she divided everything up into sections and then each part or segment was only a few pages long. I hate long chapters and so forth so this was awesome.



View all my reviews

Book Review - One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

 Synopsis: For cynical twenty-three-year-old August, moving to New York City is supposed to prove her right: that things like magic and cinematic love stories don’t exist, and the only smart way to go through life is alone. She can’t imagine how waiting tables at a 24-hour pancake diner and moving in with too many weird roommates could possibly change that. And there’s certainly no chance of her subway commute being anything more than a daily trudge through boredom and electrical failures.

But then, there’s this gorgeous girl on the train.

Jane. Dazzling, charming, mysterious, impossible Jane. Jane with her rough edges and swoopy hair and soft smile, showing up in a leather jacket to save August’s day when she needed it most. August’s subway crush becomes the best part of her day, but pretty soon, she discovers there’s one big problem: Jane doesn’t just look like an old school punk rocker. She’s literally displaced in time from the 1970s, and August is going to have to use everything she tried to leave in her own past to help her. Maybe it’s time to start believing in some things, after all.

 My Thoughts: I loved Jane and August's budding romance. It was very much an enjoyable and weird read at the same time because of Jane's situation bless her big heart. This book gave me all the "feels"! I laughed, I got angry, I cried, and so much more all while cheering these two on and hoping upon hope they'd find a way to make things work out.

View all my reviews

Book Review - The Children on the Hill by Jennifer McMahon

The Children on the Hill by Jennifer McMahon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

 Synopsis: A genre-defying new novel, inspired by Mary Shelley’s masterpiece Frankenstein, which brilliantly explores the eerie mysteries of childhood and the evils perpetrated by the monsters among us.

1978: at her renowned treatment center in picturesque Vermont, the brilliant psychiatrist, Dr. Helen Hildreth, is acclaimed for her compassionate work with the mentally ill. But when she's home with her cherished grandchildren, Vi and Eric, she’s just Gran—teaching them how to take care of their pets, preparing them home-cooked meals, providing them with care and attention and love.

Then one day Gran brings home a child to stay with the family. Iris—silent, hollow-eyed, skittish, and feral—does not behave like a normal girl.

Still, Violet is thrilled to have a new playmate. She and Eric invite Iris to join their Monster Club, where they catalogue all kinds of monsters and dream up ways to defeat them. Before long, Iris begins to come out of her shell. She and Vi and Eric do everything together: ride their bicycles, go to the drive-in, meet at their clubhouse in secret to hunt monsters. Because, as Vi explains, monsters are everywhere.

2019: Lizzy Shelley, the host of the popular podcast Monsters Among Us, is traveling to Vermont, where a young girl has been abducted, and a monster sighting has the town in an uproar. She’s determined to hunt it down, because Lizzy knows better than anyone that monsters are real—and one of them is her very own sister.

My Thoughts: Holy smokes I loved this book! I enjoyed it from the first sentence until the last and flew thru it like a mad woman!

I have read at least one other book from this author and she is famous for her dual time line stories and is one author who can really make them work in her favor. I'm not able to pinpoint which I enjoyed the best however in this particular story because at different times they both had a different type appeal that drew me in and made me want to stay up into the night to finish the story.

Frankenstein has always been one of my favorite childhood monsters and I love what Jennifer did with it here amongst the three children. As bits begin to become apparent as to what has happened to Iris the story begins to open up and build and build until the twists start appearing and flooring me and once it was all said and done I could have kicked myself for my mistake in the reading that was so darn clever! Kudos to Jennifer for another fine tale!

View all my reviews

Book Review - Like a Lily Among the Thorns by Karen S. Bell

Like a Lily Among the Thorns by Karen S. Bell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

 Synopsis:  Gabrielle Bernstein, the MC of Like a Lily Among the Thorns, is a woman in her twenties and has started her career as a librarian at a NYC public library. Abandoned by her father as a young girl and now orphaned by her deranged mother, Gabby longs for a family connection. Coincidentally, she finds this connection at the same time she inherits a B&B in Vermont from her estranged and now deceased father. This enchanted inn is under the watchful eye of goddesses of myth and legend who have been tasked to save mankind from destroying itself and this planet. These goddesses will use their powers to try and stall the onslaught of the effects of droughts, floods, and rising temperatures. But as a safety net they have collected human saviors all over the planet to erect safe havens at high altitudes away from flood waters and blistering temperatures.

My Thoughts: I'm not quite sure what I was expecting when I started reading this story and although it wasn't really what I think I had anticipated I still "liked" it enough to finish reading it. It was just long enough for me to not get overly bored though.

I found the writing beautiful for the most part but I feel like I would have enjoyed the story more had it just been a regular type story without the fantasy woven in because I was enjoying tagging along with Gabby's life and all she had been through and the burdens it had placed on her and how she chose to adapt in lieu of letting life get her down. However that is pretty much all I can say kept me reading and interested because the other characters just fell flat for me....some of them even perhaps as if they had no real reason for being there?

View all my reviews