Wednesday, April 21, 2021

{I've Been Reading} Until I Find You

Until I Find You by Rea Frey 

What would happen if a mother reached down into her three-month-old son's crib and discovered that the baby lying there was not her own? What if none of her friends noticed the subtle differences that made it so obvious to her? What if no  one believed the blind widow at all? I absolutely loved this domestic thriller. Rebecca is such a likeable character and the author did such a  great job of pulling me into her world. The ending fell a bit flat, but the journey to get there had me holding my breath the whole time. 



My Little Girl by Shalini Boland

A little girl is missing, vanished from the fair she was visiting with her grandmother and a little friend. One moment she was there, her red dress reflected over and over in the mirrors of the funhouse....then her grandmother's phone rang and there was no harm in answering as long as the children were within sight...

Claire is furious. Her husband was supposed to be watching the girls, not sending them off with his mother. Instead he changed plans without telling her and, while Claire was getting ready for a girls night out, their daughter was taken. 

The book begins just moments before Beatrice's disappearance and alternates between Claire and her mother-in-law. There's been tension building between the two women for quite a while and it seems like the older woman is only making things worse. It's an entertaining, fast paced thriller, but I feel like the ending was drawn out a bit longer than it needed to be. 

The Influencer by Miranda Rijks

When internet celebrity, Skye, swoops in and announces that she will be to promoting Sacha's Sanctuary, the charity he established in the name of his late wife, Nathan is quickly overwhelmed. His two teenage daughters idolize the woman, and her endorsement is bringing in huge donations, so he goes along with her plans. After all, his whole goal is to help the homeless and that's what they're doing. Skye lacks boundaries and is causing all kinds of chaos in his home life, but maybe it's all worth it? The book alternates between the present and Skye's past as a homeless teenager and it's a fast paced, fun thriller that kept me turning pages to see what would happen next. 

 

Little Bandaged Days by Kyra Wilder 

I didn't know what I was getting into with this book. I was expecting some sort of domestic thriller, maybe because I have a bad habit of skimming the cover copy to see if anything catches my eye. A young mother moves to Geneva with her husband and two young children. Her husband is always working and she is left alone in their rented apartment with the little ones for days and weeks at a time, slowly unravelling. On the day they move in, the grey walls make her feel like they're protected inside an oyster shell. Not much later, "we could have been the pulpy carcasses of goats swallowed whole by a crocodile." If The Yellow Wallpaper had been the story of a stay at home mother, this would be it. If I have a complaint about this one (other than the fact that the narrator only refers to her children and husband by their first initials) it's that nothing much happens. A woman unravels at an increasing rate and the whole thing is described by some gorgeous prose...but that's it.

Disclosure -- The publisher provided me with an advance review copy .This post contains affiliate links. 


Wednesday, April 14, 2021

{I've Been Reading} Smithy

 

Smithy by Amanda Desiree 

Set in 1974, in a run down mansion, this book immediately caught my interest. Surrounded by the palatial summer homes of the ultra wealthy, a group of college students are conducting a research experiment with a young chimpanzee. He's been raised in a family setting and now they'll be teaching him sign language in an effort to document his intelligence and his ability to communicate. Last used as a private boarding school, most of the large building has been sealed off due to safety concerns. It's dark and creaky and prone to unexplained fires that they blame on the old wiring. Told through letters and research videos and excerpts from books written long after the actual events, the story build slowly. Once the worst happened, it wasn't as nightmarish as I'd expected it to be, but the book itself was interesting enough that I didn't mind that it never got actually scary. 

 

It Will Just Be Us by Jo Kaplan 

Sam has lived her entire life in Wakefield, a decaying mansion built by her ancestors at the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp. The rotting hallways and rooms shift and change. The building is filled with ghosts. Sam and her mother and her sister, Liz, have always known that. They speak softly so that they won't have to hear their conversations repeated later...because they are surrounded not only by the ghosts of the dead, but by apparitions their own younger selves.   It took me a while to figure out what was going on in the house, but once I did understand how the hauntings and apparitions worked,  I started to enjoy the book a lot more. There's cruelty, which I found hard to read, and a lot of dense, elaborate descriptive prose, but once the plot really picked up, it gave me chills. 

Disclosure -- The publisher provided me with an advance review copy. This post contains affiliate links. 

Wednesday, April 07, 2021

{I've Been Reading} You Love Me


You Love Me by Caroline Kepnes 

There's a third book in the You series by Caroline Kepnes and I couldn't wait to start reading it. Joe has left New York and California behind for a small town in the Pacific Northwest where he's fallen for a very nice librarian. They'll be perfect together and he's planning their future as a couple and for a brief moment it's easy to almost forget who and what he is. I felt like the book got off to a slow start, but once things started to get complicated it got very interesting very fast and I couldn't put it down.  

Disclosure -- The publisher provided me with an advance review copy. This post contains affiliate links. 

Friday, April 02, 2021

Let's Make Baby Quilts! {April 2021}

 

Let's Make Baby Quilts Linky Party Rules:  Link directly to your post or specific Flickr photo. Your post can be about a baby quilt that's finished, or in progress, or you can be writing about what you have planned,  as long as it's about baby quilts. You're welcome to link to baby quilt posts that aren't brand new, but please don't submit the same post or picture more than once. I'd love it if you linked back to my site, either with a text link or the Let's Make Baby Quilts! button.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

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