★★★★☆ Sometimes bad things happen in the most beautiful places. In this case, the beautiful place is a picturesque cliff overlooking the ocean outside Pippa and Gabe’s beachside cottage. The cliff has become a popular place for people planning to jump to their deaths. Since moving in, Gabe has always been able to calmly talk potential jumpers out of leaping until one day Pippa watches as a young woman meets her death during an intense encounter with Gabe.
Tag: book blog
Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
★★★★☆ In this non-fiction book, the author, a journalist, goes undercover to see if she can make a living working a series of minimum-wage jobs. She travels to different cities and works as a domestic house cleaner, waitress, hotel maid, dietary aide at a nursing home, and sales clerk at Walmart. She sometimes holds multiple jobs at once and works seven days a week to be able to afford food and rent.
Name of the Devil by Andrew Mayne
★★★☆☆ The second book in Andrew Mayne’s Jessica Blackwood series, Name of the Devil has Jessica investigating the explosion of a small town West Virginia church where the congregation appears to have vanished into thin air.
Not Nice by Aziz Gazipura
★★★★☆ There is such a thing as being too nice. And, according to the author of Not Nice, if you’re someone who is plagued with too much niceness, it is causing you misery in the form of mental anguish and physical pain. In fact, he goes as far as to say your niceness is making the world a worse place for you and for others.
Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry
★★★★☆ I am a huge Friends fan. I loved the show so much that I somehow managed to turn it into the subject of my undergraduate research project in college. The sarcastic Chandler Bing, played by Matthew Perry, was my favorite character on the show.
The Writing Retreat by Julia Bartz
★★★☆☆ I’m a sucker for fiction books that involve writers and their processes. There’s something inherently interesting about an author writing about a writer. Based on the description, this book fits the bill while adding an eccentric mentor, a creepy locale, and some ex-bestie dram
Before Dawn by Laura Murphy
★★★☆☆ Max Abbracciaventio, a biracial young woman living in New York with her adopted family, has made some questionable choices in her life. One of them was having an affair with an abusive married man 14 years her senior.
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
★★★★☆ Melinda Sordino calls the cops at a late summer party, a move that gets her ostracized during her freshman year at Merryweather High School. The loss of her friends and the isolation begin to get to her, and she starts to withdraw, speaking as little as possible with art class as her only refuge.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
★★★★☆ I read this book as part of a pledge I made to read at least one banned book a month in 2023. I selected from the American Library Association’s Banned Book Guide, which includes 52 banned books. In this book, Arnold Spirit, Jr. lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation with his family and his best friend Rowdy.
What Lies in the Woods by Kate Alice Marshall
★★★★☆ When she was eleven, Naomi Shaw survived a brutal murder attempt that occurred one summer night when she and her childhood best friends, Olivia and Cassidy, were playing a made-up game in the woods. The trio banded together and, with Naomi’s brave eyewitness testimony, they helped bring a serial killer to justice for stabbing her seventeen times that night.