The Return of King Lillian by Suzie Plakson 📚 BOOK REVIEW

Suzie Plakson

I read a digital edition of The Return of King Lillian that I received for free from Reedsy Discovery in exchange for an honest review.

Genre: Literary fiction, fairy tale, fantasy.

Publisher: Pilmsthistle & Co.

Originally published: November 1st, 2012 (as a shorter novella)

Pages: 390 (paperback)

Audiobook length: 11 hrs and 54 mins

Synopsis by the publisher:

A new hero’s journey for dreamers of all ages…

When Lillian, the one-and-only heir to the throne, is cast out of her kingdom by malevolent forces, she accidentally wanders into the Forest of Forgetfullness, where she is rescued by wolves and raised by an eccentric old wise woman. When she comes of age, Lillian is called by Destiny to return Home, but when she steps out of the Forest, she has no memory of who she is or from whence she hails. Undaunted, the spirited, self-reliant young woman sets off into the unknown, determined to rediscover her long-lost self and to reclaim her stolen birthright. Most of the tale is told by Lillian herself as she chronicles her extraordinary adventures.

My thoughts:

Going into this story I was expecting it to be an entertaining fast read meant for children. I was not prepared for the adventure that I set out on.

First off, I want to just mention the brilliant idea of having Lillian mentioned as a girl-king instead of a queen! That was the thing that caught my attention in the first place and made me curious for more.

The Return of King Lillian is a brilliant fairytale that reminded me a lot of stories like “The Wizard of Oz”, “Alice in Wonderland” and “Gulliver’s Travels”. The whole story is written as if we’re reading Lillian’s diary. This made the reading experience very unique and personal, as if Lillian and I were sitting in front of a fireplace while she told me her whole story.

The thing that truly blew me away with this book was the beautiful way it is written. Sometimes it read like the fairytales I remember my parents reading for me when I was a kid, other times, it’s felt like I was reading a whimsical poem.

Lillian is such a wholesome, pure and naive character because of her time isolated in the Forest of Forgetfulness. But she’s also a strong character, and a lot of the challenges she meets throughout her journey can easily be linked to the problems that we meet out here in the real world. She takes them on with a positive and free-minded spirit, and the character development of Lillian is just a pure joy to witness as the pages go by.

Plakson has written a story that can be enjoyed by both kids as well as adults, with colorful characters, adventure, wisdom, and a good dose of wit and humor.

The Return of King Lillian is not a book that I speed read (as I often find myself doing with fairytales), but it was savored and enjoyed over time as the masterpiece that it is!

Click on the Reedsy Discovery logo below to get to know more, maybe get your own copy, and let me know what you think of it💛

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The Bachmann Books by Stephen King 📚 BOOK REVIEW

Stephen King

I read a hardback version of The Bachman Books.

Genre: Horror, fiction.

Publisher: Erid Press Inc. 

Originally published: May 22nd, 2019

Pages: 263 (paperback)

Synopsis by the publisher:

Rage

A disturbed high-school student with authority problems kills one of his teachers and takes the rest of his class hostage. Over the course of one long, tense and unbearable hot afternoon, Charlie Decker explains what led him to this drastic sequence of events, while at the same time deconstructing the personalities of his classmates, forcing each one to justify his or her existence.

The Long Walk

In the near future, where America has become a police state, one hundred boys are selected to enter an annual contest where the winner will be awarded whatever he wants for the rest of his life. The game is simple – maintain a steady walking pace of four miles per hour without stopping. Three warnings, and you’re out – permanently.

Roadwork

Barton Dawes’ unremarkable but comfortable existence suddenly takes a turn for the worst. Highway construction puts him out of work and simultaneously forces him out of his home. Dawes isn’t the sort of man who will take an insult of this magnitude lying down. His single-minded determination to fight the inevitable course of progress drives his wife and friends away while he tries to face down the uncaring bureaucracy that has destroyed his once comfortable life.

The Running Man

It is 2025 and reality TV has progressed to the point where people are willing to wager their lives in exchange for a chance at enormous wealth. Ben Richards is desperate – he needs money to treat his daughter’s illness. His last chance is entering a game show called The Running Man where the objective is to elude police and specially trained trackers for a month. The reward is a cool billion dollars. The catch is that everyone else on the planet is watching and willing to turn him in for a reward.

My thoughts:

First of all, I want to thank Alex Ochoa, the wonderful YouTube subscriber that sent me a hardback copy of this book! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

I was very excited to get my hands on the stories that Stephen King chose to publish under a pseudonym. This edition also has “Rage” in it which is a story that is no longer being printed. This is because a real-life event in 1998 was inspired by the book and Stephen King felt morally obliged to let the book die from the publishing world.

The typical Stephen King voice and references are definitely easy to spot when you already know that it is his work.
So let’s go through each of them, story by story.

Rage

The story of a young man named Charlie Decker who has been sent to the principal’s office because of an assault on a teacher. After that, he goes on a tirade in the school and holds a class hostage.

I thought it was interesting to read a story like this with the thoughts in mind of how often events like this take place nowadays. It’s equally as current now, and maybe even more so than it was back then. It is hard to try to set oneself in the shoes of someone who acts out in such an extreme way, and maybe even more interesting to see just how confusing it can all be inside the head of that person as well.
The story is one of slow-burning suspense and I thought it was quite interesting.

I can definitely understand why King felt it necessary to take it off the market, but in the same way, it seems like all the school shootings around are not specifically inspired by the literature that takes on that specific setting but more inspired by other events like them. Even so, I highly respect King’s decision to take the story out of print.
Rage was an interesting read, but it didn’t quite grab me.

The Long Walk

And what a long walk it was indeed! I have no idea why it took me what felt like forever to get through this story. It’s a really interesting story about the will to live. You have 100 boys setting out for The Walk where they have to hold a certain pace and always stay on their feet until there’s only one boy left who will win “the prize”.

It touches on some really good subjects of mental strain and mental health. Showcasing the way a mind can completely fall apart when it’s put under too much pressure. It’s also a take on a very conservative futuristic America.

It is a gruesome tale of staring death in the eye and trying to find the will to survive when everything feels hopeless. I also really enjoyed the friendships that we got to see between the contestants, as well as the rivalry. The pressure put on humans can bring out both the best and the worst in us all.

Roadwork

Roadwork tells the story of Mr. Dawes who has a lot of anger towards the new highway extension project in his town that forces him to move away from what has been his home for many years. We also get to know a lot of Dawes’s emotional hardships, and his unwillingness to let go of the past throughout this story.

We follow a man on a mission. A man who completely unravels.
Reading Roadwork is like watching a train crash in slow motion. You know it’s going to end in horror, but you just can’t look away. It’s a detailed and interesting journey of how a single thought or an idea can grow into something truly insane when fuelled by hate and unresolved issues.

I enjoyed it as much as I found it uncomfortable, but in a good way. If that makes any sense?

The Running Man

In The Running Man, we visit a dystopian US in 2025 where there’s a television game show that hunts its contestants to their death. Ben Richards joins the game show in the hope of winning enough money to get medicine for his gravely ill daughter. The contestants earn $100 for every hour they stay alive, an additional $100 for each law enforcement officer or Hunter he kills, and a grand prize of $1 billion if he survives for 30 days.

It’s a suspenseful cat and mouse kind of story, with an interesting and mysterious countdown going on throughout that has you guessing.
I really enjoyed this story and found it to be the only one in the book where I felt like I was kept at the edge of my seat and did not want to put it down.
It touches on some interesting subjects of the economy and society. How far are we willing to go? How much are we willing to accept as entertainment instead of cruelty? How easily do we eat up the information fed to us by the media?

Again, this truly is a story of how horrible and selfish some people can be. I loved it!

Overall I found The Bachman Books to be a solid collection of good stories. It took me forever to get through them, but not because I didn’t enjoy them. I kind of wish that I would’ve read them as separate books instead of a collection. It might not have felt as intimidating as individual books.

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Unteachable by Leah Raeder (Elliot Wake) 📚 BOOK REVIEW

Elliot Wake (formerly known as Leah Raeder)

I read a paperback version of Unteachable as a part of my Exploring Erotica project.

Genre: Adult & contemporary fiction, Erotica

Publisher: Atria Books

Originally published: July 27th, 2013

Pages: 320 (paperback)

Audiobook length: 9 Hours 49 Minutes

Blurb by the publisher:

Maise O’Malley just turned eighteen, but she’s felt like a grown-up her entire life. The summer before senior year, she has plans: get into a great film school, convince her mom to go into rehab, and absolutely do not, under any circumstances, screw up her own future. 

But life has a way of throwing her plans into free-fall. 

When Maise meets Evan at a carnival one night, their chemistry is immediate, intense, and short-lived. Which is exactly how she likes it: no strings. But afterward, she can’t get Evan out of her head. He’s taught her that a hookup can be something more. It can be an unexpected connection with someone who truly understands her. Someone who sees beyond her bravado to the scared but strong girl inside. 

That someone turns out to be her new film class teacher, Mr. Evan Wilke. 

Maise and Evan resolve to keep their hands off each other, but the attraction is too much to bear. Together, they’re real and genuine; apart, they’re just actors playing their parts for everyone else. And their masks are slipping. People start to notice. Rumors fly. When the truth comes to light in a shocking way, they may learn they were just playing parts for each other, too. 

Smart, sexy, and provocative, Unteachable is about what happens when a love story goes off-script

My thoughts:

I’ve been on the search for good adult fiction and erotica through my Exploring Erotica Project that’s been going on for a few years now. Around my birthday last year, I ordered a big bunch of erotica novels that were recommended to me in the comment section of one of the first Exploring Erotica videos I posted on YouTube. That is how I came across Unteachable and I was immediately intrigued by the story and the good reviews.

One of the first things I noticed that made me instantly like Maise as the main character was how strong and funny she was. Having read quite a few erotica novels by now, I feel like it’s a way too common thing to put young and inexperienced characters in these stories as sort of damsels in distress, and honestly, I’m not a fan.

When it comes to stories of love and sex, I much more enjoy experienced and strong characters that stand up for themselves. Maise, although she comes from a problematic upbringing, she is a very strong and passionate character. She’s very aware of her femininity, sexuality, and the power that comes with both.

I was worried that I would see the overly dominant and submissive character tropes when I saw that the story was about the relationship between a teacher and a student, but it didn’t have that.

Both characters are quite young(18 and 32), and the age difference between them doesn’t make the relationship between the characters uncomfortable and weird.

It’s more the story of an inconvenient setting of two young people that find themselves attracted to each other and trying to find out how to rightly maneuver their way through the jungle of love, lust, and judgment.

Something that adds to the depth of the characters is the fact they do carry each of their own demons into the relationship they start and that complicate things, as those pesky past demons tend to do. This makes it into a more realistic story.

Talking about realistic; the sex is very well written and fairly graphic, and there’s quite a lot of it, so this one is not for those readers who’re looking for “clean romances”. I really appreciated the erotica parts of this story. I thought it was well balanced with the rest of the story.

Unteachable is also a sort of coming of age story as well. It has the elements of worry and uncertainty about making big life choices, which is something we all can relate to on some level.

I think that this book also does a really good job of portraiting that slightly unhealthy obsession that sometimes happens when falling in love.

These characters and their relationship was interesting to observe as it grew and changed.

The secrecy and potential drama that comes with this forbidden relationship also make this story into a pageturner that’s hard to put down.

Unteachable is a breath of fresh air in a genre that really needs exactly that, and more awesome storytellers like Elliot Wake (formerly known as Leah Raeder).

 Click on the Bookdepository banner below to get your own copy with free shipping, make up your own mind, and let me know what you think of it💛

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Penpal by Dathan Auerbach 📚 BOOK REVIEW

I read a Kindle edition of Penpal.

Dathan Auerbach

Genre: Horror

Publisher: 1000vultures

Originally published: June, 2012

Pages: 252 (paperback)

Blurb by the publisher:

In an attempt to make sense of his own mysterious and unsettling childhood memories, a man begins to reconstruct his past. As the games and adventures of his youth become engulfed by a larger story, he finds that it forms a tapestry of unbelievable horror that he never could have expected. Each chapter completes a different piece of the puzzle for both you and the narrator, and by the end of it all, you will wish that you could forget what he never knew. 

My thoughts:

Penpal is a book that I’ve seen pop up from time to time as a recommended horror novel, and I downloaded it to my kindle years ago, and then I kind of forgot about it. Then when I was traveling to Bucharest, I packed my Kindle with me, and I was scrolling through my library. There it was, and I was intrigued once again.

We meet our protagonist (who remains nameless throughout the book) when he’s grown up and is looking back on certain mysterious and creepy events that happened to him, his family and friends while growing up.

Every chapter of this book really does feel like a puzzle piece that slowly but surely makes a complete and horrific picture.

We get the sense of the protagonist being stalked very early on in the book, but it’s not until the final pieces of the puzzle is put into place that the reader is actually able to paint the whole picture, and understand just how creepy and sad this story actually is.

I found Penpal to be horror perfection for my taste, and I really liked the fact that the protagonist remains unnamed throughout the whole story. It kind of adds to the mystery of it all.

The voice of the character portraits the mind of a young boy as well as an adult man looking back on his life. It’s an interesting concept to look at events like the ones in this story through the eyes of a child. One that the world has yet to be tainted by all the evil that is happening in the world.

Auerbach has built up a great story with a good pace that instantly grabbed a hold of me as a reader and took me on a journey of stalker creepiness where I thought I had an idea of what was going on, but it was hard to know for sure.

It’s hard to say much more about this story without spoiling it, so I won’t.

I loved this story, and I highly recommend it to the horror lovers out there who haven’t read it yet!

 Click on the Bookdepository banner below to get your own copy with free shipping, make up your own mind, and let me know what you think of it💛

The Valkyries by Paulo Coelho 📚 BOOK REVIEW

I read a paperback version of The Valkyries.

Paulo Coelho

Genre: Contemporary fiction, fiction

Publisher: HarperCollins

Originally published: 1988

Pages: 256 (paperback)

Audiobook length: 5 Hours 10 Minutes

Blurb by the publisher:

This is a modern-day adventure story featuring Paulo’s supernatural encounter with angels – who appear as warrior women and travel through the Mojave desert on their motorbikes.

Haunted by a devastating curse, Paulo is instructed by his mysterious spiritual master to embark upon a journey – to find and speak to his guardian angel in an attempt to confront and overcome his dark past. The Valkyries is a compelling account of this forty day quest into the searing heat of the Mojave Desert, where Paulo and his wife, Chris, encounter the Valkyries – warrior women who travel the desert on motorcycles, spreading the word of angels.

My thoughts:

It’s been a few years since I discovered Coelho’s writing in Adultery and The Alchemist. I’ve read a couple of other books by him since, and they’ve been a mixture of hits and misses.

The Valkyrie falls somewhere in between for me.

This book tells the story of Paulo and his wife Christina that travels to the Mojave desert to find their guardian angel. It is classified as fiction, as Coelho himself has taken a bit of creative freedom when telling their story.

I find spiritual stories to be very interesting, but when it comes to The Valkyries, the heavy focus on angels just wasn’t a huge hit with me. It painted such a strong picture of religion and not spirituality, which isn’t really my cup of tea. That being said, Coelho is a very talented storyteller, and he does well with building up an interesting storyline of their trip to the desert.

I thought the parts of the story where Paulo and Christina spent time with the Valkyries was the most interesting part, and I would have loved to have gotten to know even more about them.

But I also understand that Paulo didn’t want to make up too much of their stories by adding plenty of fiction to it.

This might be what makes me lose interest in the story at times. It is the fact that I don’t know what’s fiction and what’s real. This makes it hard to be baffled by the miracles and happenings of this story because I can’t seem to wrap my head around what’s a truly amazing personal experience and what just happens to be make-believe. This might just be my personal preference about the build-up of a story that ruins this for me, I’m not sure.

I didn’t think that The Valkyries was a bad book, I just think it wasn’t for me. The religious aspect of it turned out to be a bit overwhelming for my taste, and it didn’t leave me with that lasting impression that for instance The Alchymist or Adultery did. That being said, I can definitely see the message that he wants to come across when it comes to facing our own past and forgiving.

So overall I would say that The Valkyries is an interesting story with much potential, and for the right person, I think it could be an amazing read. Unfortunately, I am not that person.

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The Girl He Used to Know by Tracey Garvis Graves 📚 BOOK REVIEW

I listened to an audiobook version of The Girl He Used to Know on Audible.

Tracey Garvis Graves

Genre: Contemporary fiction/Romance

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

Originally published: April 2nd, 2019

Pages: 291 (hardcover)

Audiobook length: 8 Hours 10 Minutes

Blurb by the publisher:

Annika (rhymes with Monica) Rose is an English major at the University of Illinois. Anxious in social situations where she finds most people’s behavior confusing, she’d rather be surrounded by the order and discipline of books or the quiet solitude of playing chess.

Jonathan Hoffman joined the chess club and lost his first game–and his heart–to the shy and awkward, yet brilliant and beautiful Annika. He admires her ability to be true to herself, quirks and all, and accepts the challenges involved in pursuing a relationship with her. Jonathan and Annika bring out the best in each other, finding the confidence and courage within themselves to plan a future together. What follows is a tumultuous yet tender love affair that withstands everything except the unforeseen tragedy that forces them apart, shattering their connection and leaving them to navigate their lives alone. 

Now, a decade later, fate reunites Annika and Jonathan in Chicago. She’s living the life she wanted as a librarian. He’s a Wall Street whiz, recovering from a divorce and seeking a fresh start. The attraction and strong feelings they once shared are instantly rekindled, but until they confront the fears and anxieties that drove them apart, their second chance will end before it truly begins.

My Thoughts:

I was looking for something light and slightly romantic when I was browsing through Audible for a new audiobook and found this one. Little did I know that what I thought was just a fluffy story of young love reconnected was to be so much more, and I would fall completely in love with it.

The Girl He Used to Know tells the story of Annika and Jonathan who meet when they’re both studying at the University of Illinois. We jump between the time that they met and got to know each other, and a decade later when they are reconnected once again in Chicago.

It’s easy to understand from the very beginning of the story that Annika’s mind works a little differently from most others. She is very anxious, and she talks about her experiences with therapy and how she struggles at times with everyday life.

I think this is what makes this story so unique and different. Told from the perspective of someone who obviously has some kind of mental disability (and the reader slowly, but surely gets a clearer picture of how much) but is also highly functional and tries to live as normal of a life as possible.

It was a very different kind of perspective in a love story that was new to me, and one that I really appreciated.

I want to see more stories like this. More characters with the kind of depth and difficulties that we see in Annika. And the fact that we also get a glimpse of how her challenges are perceived by Jonathan as well adds so much more to the story.

Tracy Garvis Grayes has written a beautiful and funny story. One that is both heartwarming and heartbreaking at the same time. It took me on a journey I had no idea that I was about to venture out on, and I loved every minute of it. Even the ones where I bawled my eyes out.

This book is so much more than a love story. I wish I could explain why, but that would spoil too much, and I wouldn’t want to ruin it for you.

Highly, highly recommend if you want a deeper and different kind of love story that touches on some subjects of mental health and disabilities that deserves way more attention than it is getting.

Click on the Bookdepository link below to get your own copy with free shipping, and let me know what you think of the book!

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One Day in December by Josie Silver 📚 BOOK REVIEW

I listen to an audiobook version of One Day in December on Audible. 

Josie Silver

Genre: Fiction, Romance, Contemporary

Publisher: Random House Audio (audiobook)

Originally published: October 16th, 2018

Pages: 416 (paperback)

Audiobook length: 10 Hours 27 Minutes

Blurb by the publisher:

Laurie is pretty sure love at first sight doesn’t exist. After all, life isn’t a scene from the movies, is it? But then, through a misted-up bus window one snowy winter’s day, she sees a man she knows instantly is the one. Their eyes meet, there’s a moment of pure magic…and then her bus drives away. 

Laurie thinks she’ll never see the boy from the bus again. But at a party a year later, her best friend Sarah introduces her to the new love of her life. Who is, of course, the boy from the bus.

Determined to let him go, Laurie gets on with her life. But what if fate has other plans?

Following Laurie, Sarah and Jack through ten years of love, heartbreak, and friendship, One Day in December is an uplifting, heart-warming and immensely moving love story that you’ll want to escape into forever, for fans of Jojo Moyes, Lucy Diamond, and Nicholas Sparks.

My Thoughts:

Right before Christmas 2018, I felt like I saw the cover of this book everywhere! I don’t know what it is about that, but sometimes it just completely puts me off wanting to read it. It was kind of like that with One Day in December as well. I didn’t feel drawn to it, I was so sure it was just some cheesy romance with a whole lot of too much Christmas crammed into it.

I judged the book by its cover (come on, all of us book lovers do from time to time), and I was wrong.

I found myself searching for my lacking Christmas spirit and decided that I was going to use my Audible credit on a Christmassy audiobook, but I didn’t want to go for one of the classics. Suddenly this book popped up again, and I took the time to read some of the non-spoiler reviews, and I was convinced to give it a go.

Where I thought I would we overwhelmed by an overly cheesy back and forth love story, I got so much more. This is a story about friendship, as much as it is about love. I loved hearing about Laurie and Sarah’s friendship, as I could relate to a lot of the struggle and the wonders of having such a strong friendship with someone.

The characters developed a lot through the story as well, and it was nice to see a set of characters that were actually quite relatable. They had the ups and downs of normal life.

And I got to say, Josie Silver sure added some funny and somewhat cringey scenes that had me giggling.

Yes, it is a romance novel! Yes, it has Christmas in it, but a lot less than I expected!

I was prepared to not like this book, and I did not go in with high expectations, but I ended up really enjoying this one! I was immersed in the story of Laurie and Jack, told by both perspectives. I found it to be an addictive read (or listen on my part) and one that I just flew through.

The only thing that took it down from a top-rated review for me was that everything kind of resolved whirlwind quick at the end.

But still, this is a story that has stuck with me more so than any other love story I’ve read in a while. Highly recommend if you’re looking for something light, fun and romantic!

Click on the Bookdepository link below to get your own copy, and let me know what you think of the book!

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The Course of Love by Alain de Botton 📚 BOOK REVIEW

Alain de Botton

I read a paperback version of The Course of Love.

Genre: Fiction, contemporary, romance.

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd.

Originally published: April 28th, 2016

Pages: 240 (Paperback)

Audiobook length: 7 hrs, 5 mins (Narrated by Julian Rhind-Tutt)

 

Blurb by the Publisher:

Modern love is never easy. Society is obsessed with stories of romance, but what comes after happily ever after?

This is a love story with a difference. From dating to marriage, from having kids to having affairs, it follows the progress of a single ordinary relationship: tender, messy, hilarious, painful, and entirely un-Romantic. It is a love story for the modern world, chronicling the daily intimacies, the blazing rows, the endless tiny gestures that make up a life shared between two people. Moving and deeply insightful, The Course of Love offers us a window into essential truths about the nature of love.

📚

The course of love delivers exactly what it promises. 
It is the true story of what might (and often) happens when 
true love meets real life.

My Thoughts:

The Course of Love caught my attention at the airport in Amsterdam. There was something about the cover, and then there was the backside of the paperback that said: “What happens when true love meets real life?”

This is something that I feel is missing in a lot of literature these days. We have plenty of grandiose and dramatic love stories, but not as many of the ones that are more realistic.

In the course of love, we meet Rabih and Kirsten, from the start as they date, fall in love, explore each other, and then settle into a serious relationship. We get to follow along for the ups and the downs, and some of the real dramas that happen in a real-life relationship. How we fall in love, all the emotions, the doubts, and the hardships.

I loved the small passages between the chapters that had some general thoughts about love, relationship, and sex.

Rabih and Kirsten’s story is very relatable, and I think most people who’ve been in some long-term relationships will be able to relate to some or all of it.

The course of love delivers exactly what it promises. It is the true story of what might (and often) happens when true love meets real life. It’s a wonderfully fresh breath of literature that focuses on love.

Highly recommend!

Do you want to make up your own opinion about the book?

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Adultery by Paulo Coelho – REVIEW

Adultery is a contemporary fiction novel. I read this in paperback format.

Published: August 19th, 2014 

Publisher: Knopf

Pages: 272 (paperback)

Audiobook length: 8hrs and 10 min

 

 

 

Synopsis by the publisher:

Linda knows she’s lucky. Yet every morning when she opens her eyes to a so-called new day, she feels like closing them again. Her friends recommend medication. But Linda wants to feel more, not less. And so she embarks on an adventure as unexpected as it is daring, and which reawakens a side of her that she – respectable wife, loving mother, ambitious journalist – thought had disappeared. Even she can’t predict what will happen next…

***

The Writing

Coelho’s writing is breathtakingly beautiful! There aren’t many writers that has captured and moved me the way that Coelho does again and again. The way he paints a perfect mental image of the honesty in any flawed situation is what made this book so hard to put down.

It’s utterly fascinating how he can put together the same words as we all use into an emotional masterpiece.

 

The Characters

I felt an instant connection to Linda. Her fear of missing out on things in life but in the same way fearing to let go of what she already had is something that I can see as relatable to so many of us.

Her temptations and thoughts were so brutally honest and showed us a very intimate strain of thoughts that I haven’t seen done so well in a while.

She was the perfectly imperfect character and she has a special place in my heart.

The Plot

Linda certainly goes through a lot in this short book and I really did struggle to put it down. I just wanted to know where her life was taking her and how she would handle it all.

There were some moments in the book where I was truly surprised when it came to Linda’s choice of action and even though it wasn’t the choices I hoped she would make (some of the times) but I still understood how she came to make those choices. And those choices made the story go in directions that took a hold of me and held me tight throughout the whole book.

It moved at an even pace and had some twists and turns that did not blow my mind but they felt right and true to the storyline.

 

Thoughts

I loved this book and I loved Linda and all her flaws. It was a story that differs so much from anything I’ve ever read.

Coelho writes perfectly about life, loss, fears and love. A provocative, honest story with a powerful message.

Highly, highly recommend!

If you want your own copy of Adultery, click on the Amazon or BookDepository logo below!

 

 

The Far End of Happy by Kathryn Craft – REVIEW

The Far End of Happy was sent to my by the publisher via Netgalley to read and give an honest review. 

Published: May 5th, 2015

Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark

Pages: 368

Trigger warning: suicide, mental illness, depression.

 

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Twelve tense hours, three women, and the suicide standoff that turns one family’s little piece of heaven into a scene from hell.

The story starts with the day that Ronnie’s husband is supposed to move out. But when Jeff pulls into the driveway drunk with a shotgun in the passenger seat, Ronnie realizes that nothing about that day will go as planned.

We follow Ronnie, her two kids, mother and mother-in-law through the twelve intense hours of a suicide standoff. Slowly Ronnie recaps the way their marriage went to pieces and she tries to figure out just how Jeff could get so depressed that he would consider taking his own life.

An emotional journey based on a true story.

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The Writing

Kathryn Craft has done a really good job writing this story from different perspectives and giving the reader a unique insight to a very emotional and intense situation. I enjoyed her writing. The dialogues between the characters felt very real and emotional.

The way she describes the surroundings and all of the events really does make this intense story come to life.

The Characters

Ronnie was a strong and likable character. I felt for her from the very beginning of the story and was rooting for her the whole way through. Her emotions and way of handling the situation felt very genuine.

I was impressed by her strength!

Janet (the mother-in-law) on the other hand, I wanted to slap sideways more than once. She was so quick with wanting to blame Ronnie for the whole situation. Trying to point the finger at everyone else instead of seeing her own problems and how they could have caused some of Jeff’s mental problems.

A well made character that I loved to not love.

And let’s not forget about the two young boys: Will and Andrew. Loved their innocence as well as their young wisdom! They were so cute and lovable.

The Plot

This book took me a little longer to get through than I expected and not because it wasn’t good, but because it was quite mentally draining to go through. My first though after finishing the last page was: Whoa! That was intense!

There is no careful build up to where this story gets intense. It starts out that way and then you get the backstory little by little. I really liked that!

The storyline was very different from anything that I’ve read before. It talks about mental illness in very nice way. You get to see the side of a dysfunctional marriage that you often hear about but could never really grasp.

I was intrigued all the way through this emotional ride and I felt like it could not have ended any other way.

An emotional, brutal and beautiful story about love, life and the prospect of death. About losing and finding oneself in situations that can seem hopeless. About finding faith in the darkest of moments if one looks for it in the right places. 

Above all, it is a story about family. The love and the hurt, and everything in between.

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