Hi everyone and welcome to another monthly wrap up here at Stardust and Words! I feel like January and February always just drag on for me... and this year was no different, aside from being warmer than it normally is. I ended up being able to read a lot, but I didn't post as much as I wanted to! I read ten books but only got to post two reviews, though this is partially because I read a couple of books that won't come out for awhile and wasn't able to post the reviews yet! But anyways, I hope you guys had good months and Happy March!
1. Him (Him #1) – Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy ☆☆☆☆ (reread)
They don’t play for the same team. Or do they?
Jamie
Canning has never been able to figure out how he lost his closest
friend. Four years ago, his tattooed, wise-cracking, rule-breaking
roommate cut him off without an explanation. So what if things got a
little weird on the last night of hockey camp the summer they were
eighteen? It was just a little drunken foolishness. Nobody died.
Ryan
Wesley’s biggest regret is coaxing his very straight friend into a bet
that pushed the boundaries of their relationship. Now, with their
college teams set to face off at the national championship, he’ll
finally get a chance to apologize. But all it takes is one look at his
longtime crush, and the ache is stronger than ever.
Jamie has
waited a long time for answers, but walks away with only more
questions—can one night of sex ruin a friendship? If not, how about six
more weeks of it? When Wesley turns up to coach alongside Jamie for one
more hot summer at camp, Jamie has a few things to discover about his
old friend... and a big one to learn about himself.
2. Us (Him #2) – Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy ☆☆☆☆ (reread)
Can your favorite hockey players finish their first season together undefeated?
Five
months in, NHL forward Ryan Wesley is having a record-breaking rookie
season. He’s living his dream of playing pro hockey and coming home
every night to the man he loves—Jamie Canning, his longtime best friend
turned boyfriend. There’s just one problem: the most important
relationship of his life is one he needs to keep hidden, or else face a
media storm that will eclipse his success on the ice.
Jamie
loves Wes. He really, truly does. But hiding sucks. It’s not the life
Jamie envisioned for himself, and the strain of keeping their secret is
taking its toll. It doesn’t help that his new job isn’t going as
smoothly as he’d hoped, but he knows he can power through it as long as
he has Wes. At least apartment 10B is their retreat, where they can
always be themselves.
Or can they?
When Wes’s nosiest
teammate moves in upstairs, the threads of their carefully woven lie
begin to unravel. With the outside world determined to take its best
shot at them, can Wes and Jamie develop major-league relationship skills
on the fly?
3. To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf ☆☆☆
The serene and maternal
Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and
assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly
trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs
a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and
allegiances of family life and the conflict between men and women.
As
time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and
simultaneously, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest
triumph--the human capacity for change.
4. Piper Perish – Kayla Cagan ☆☆☆☆
Piper Perish inhales
air and exhales art. The sooner she and her best friends can get out of
Houston and into art school in New York City, the better. It's been
Piper's dream her whole life, and now that senior year is halfway over,
she's never felt more ready. But in the final months before graduation,
things are weird with her friends and stressful with three different
guys, and Piper's sister's tyrannical mental state seems to thwart every
attempt at happiness for the close-knit Perish family. Piper's art just
might be enough to get her out. But is she brave enough to seize that
power, even if it means giving up what she's always known? Debut author
Kayla Cagan breathes new life into fiction in this ridiculously
compelling, utterly authentic work featuring interior art from Rookie
magazine illustrator Maria Ines Gul. Piper will have readers asking big
questions along with her. What is love? What is friendship? What is
family? What is home? And who is a person when she's missing any one of
these things?
5. Lace Bone Beast – N.L. Shompole ☆☆☆☆
Here is emptiness. Here
is a mouth after a recent excavation, black with soot, devoid of
kisses. Here are hands, trembling against the soft ache of morning, here
are eyes, wet, wide, half-full of sky and loneliness. Here is belly,
back, femur, spine, ragged and smooth all at once, all at once.
Here are dreams, ink black and speckled, lost behind the eyes. Here is a
muted elegy, crow’s feet feathered over the eyes like lace. Here are
the last strains of a dirge, wild, discordant, free.
6. Done Dirt Cheap – Sarah Nicole Lemon ☆☆☆☆
Tourmaline Harris’s
life hit pause at fifteen, when her mom went to prison because of
Tourmaline’s unintentionally damning testimony. But at eighteen, her
home life is stable, and she has a strong relationship with her father,
the president of a local biker club known as the Wardens. Virginia
Campbell’s life hit fast-forward at fifteen, when her mom “sold” her
into the services of Hazard, a powerful attorney: a man for whom the law
is merely a suggestion. When Hazard sets his sights on dismantling the
Wardens, he sends in Virginia, who has every intention of selling out
the club—and Tourmaline. But the two girls are stronger than the
circumstances that brought them together, and their resilience defines
the friendship at the heart of this powerful debut novel.
7. The Names They Gave Us – Emery Lord ☆☆☆☆☆– review forthcoming
Lucy Hansson was ready
for a perfect summer with her boyfriend, working at her childhood Bible
camp on the lake. But when her mom’s cancer reappears, Lucy falters—in
faith, in love, and in her ability to cope. When her boyfriend “pauses”
their relationship and her summer job switches to a different camp—one
for troubled kids—Lucy isn’t sure how much more she can handle.
Attempting to accept a new normal, Lucy slowly regains footing among her
vibrant, diverse coworkers, Sundays with her mom, and a crush on a
fellow counselor. But when long-hidden family secrets emerge, can Lucy
set aside her problems and discover what grace really means?
8. The Princess Saves Herself in This One – Amanda Lovelace ☆☆☆1/2
"Ah, life- the thing
that happens to us while we're off somewhere else blowing on dandelions
& wishing ourselves into the pages of our favorite fairy tales."
A
poetry collection divided into four different parts: the princess, the
damsel, the queen, & you. the princess, the damsel, & the queen
piece together the life of the author in three stages, while you serves
as a note to the reader & all of humankind. Explores life & all
of its love, loss, grief, healing, empowerment, & inspirations.
9. If on a winter's night a traveler – Italo Calvino ☆☆☆
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
is a marvel of ingenuity, an experimental text that looks longingly
back to the great age of narration--"when time no longer seemed stopped
and did not yet seem to have exploded." Italo Calvino's novel is in one
sense a comedy in which the two protagonists, the Reader and the Other
Reader, ultimately end up married, having almost finished
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.
In another, it is a tragedy, a reflection on the difficulties of
writing and the solitary nature of reading. The Reader buys a
fashionable new book, which opens with an exhortation: "Relax.
Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade."
Alas, after 30 or so pages, he discovers that his copy is corrupted,
and consists of nothing but the first section, over and over. Returning
to the bookshop, he discovers the volume, which he thought was by
Calvino, is actually by the Polish writer Bazakbal. Given the choice
between the two, he goes for the Pole, as does the Other Reader,
Ludmilla. But this copy turns out to be by yet another writer, as does
the next, and the next.
The real Calvino intersperses 10 different
pastiches--stories of menace, spies, mystery, premonition--with
explorations of how and why we read, make meanings, and get our bearings
or fail to. Meanwhile the Reader and Ludmilla try to reach, and read,
each other.
If on a Winter's Night is dazzling, vertiginous, and
deeply romantic. "What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other
most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from
measurable time and space."
10. The Bad Boy Bargain – Kendra C. Highley ☆☆☆
Baseball player Kyle
Sawyer has many labels: bad boy, delinquent, ladies’ man, fearless
outfielder… Only one of them is actually true. But then sweet ballet
dancer Faith Gladwell asks him to help wreck her reputation, and
everything goes sideways.
Faith knows a thing or two about love,
and what she had with her cheating jerk of an ex wasn’t it. When he
starts spreading rumors about her being an Ice Queen, Faith decides it’s
time to let a little bad into her life.
Lucky for her, Kyle
Sawyer—dark, dangerous, totally swoonworthy Kyle Sawyer—is landscaping
her backyard over Spring Break. Shirtless. And if she can convince him
to play along, “dating” Kyle will silence the rumors.
But Faith’s plan threatens to expose Sawyer’s biggest secret of all…and that’s a risk he’s not willing to take.
hope y'all had a great reading month!
xx
Caroline
