Nora Goes Off Script by Annabel Monaghan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I read this in one swallow. It was super fun, lighthearted but sweet and just a really enjoyable summer read. If you want something light and fun, I highly recommend this one.
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Billie Starr’s mom has made a lot of mistakes in her life. She’s always saying she’s sorry. She’s trying to make better choices but keeps getting caught up in things she doesn’t mean to. There was parts of this book that I really enjoyed. I liked Billie Starr and wish there was a bit more of her in the story. I liked the best friend and the next door neighbor. But some of the story didn’t make sense to me. Why would she not have gone back for her raincoat this whole time? Even though I understood how that circled back in the end, I couldn’t understand someone who wouldn’t go back to get her things. She just seemed to be jumping from one unwise decision to another. There were a lot of characters to keep track of and many of them didn’t feel as fleshed out as they could have been. Similarly the sub-plot lines came and went and didn’t all feel relevant. I still enjoyed the time I spent with it. with gratitude to netgalley and Flatiron Books for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
“By here, he means somewhere on the western edge of the United States. It’s possible to grow up in the wrong house, on the wrong street, in the wrong town, in the wrong part of the country. It’s possible to go to the wrong school. To have the wrong dad. To be pushed to do the wrong things. But it is also possible to survive all these psychic indignities if you have one, maybe two people who recognize you for who you are. His mom saw him. By seeing him, she saved him.” I loved this book. Shapiro’s latest explores two families, going through tumultuous times, as she weaves back and forth in time to show us how they ended up here and the journey they took both in the past and into the future. The book opens up with three teens in a car accident, where one of them dies. And of course, that moment changes the lives of the parents (and the kids) forever. Then it shows the neighbors next door, with their 11 year old son, who decides to run away from home. Then the story goes back in time and it goes forward in time and by the end of the book, you are in love with every single character and your heart has been broken and put back together in a million little ways. This story is about family, resilience, being there for each other, and marriage. It’s so very beautiful. I absolutely loved it. with gratitude to edelweiss and Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review
3.5 stars I think the only reason this doesn’t get more stars from me is because I enjoyed the first book so much and this one wasn’t as interesting, to me, comparatively. If I hadn’t read the first one and read this as a standalone I am confident I would have loved it even more.
This was a quick read but since I am not particularly a fan (or not) of JFK Jr. this didn’t really speak to me. I liked the audio and the voice of both of the characters but I found the book to be mostly boring to be honest.
I think I might be done with Colleen Hoover. This one just felt lazy to me. Both of the stories felt super dragged out just to make a book. I thought all of the characters were not well developed and the plot was way way too contrived. This one wasn’t for me.
This was a well-written and unexpected mystery. I liked the fast pace and I actually quite liked the twist, too. I enjoyed the time I spent with it.
“But Zeke needed to know. You had to choose sides. And you always chose the person who didn’t fuck everything up. You chose the person who was stuck with you.” What an incredibly unusual story. This is the story of Zeke and Frankie who spend a summer together making a poster that has Zeke’s art and Frankie’s words on it. They then plaster the poster all over town. Next thing you know, it gets enmeshed with a story some teens make up to get out of trouble and things get out of hand and copies start appearing all over the world. It becomes a phenomenon. Crazy things happen. It gets out of hand. And the whole time, no one knows they started it all. “I thought that the saddest thing that could happen was that something inside your head worked so hard to make it into the world and then nothing happened. It just disappeared. Now that I’d put those words into the open air, I needed them to multiply, to reproduce, to cover the world.” This book captured the feeling of being a teen and coming of age in the 90s. What art is. What friendship can look like during those years: intense and like it’s your whole world. The characters are so real, jump out of the page so much that you can’t help but root for them. “And I wanted to say that it wasn’t his fault, that it was an accident, but maybe everything is an accident. Maybe nothing in the world is intentional. Maybe everything that has ever happened and ever will happen is some dumb mistake. So who cares if you apologize?” Wilson’s stories have so much heart and are so unique and so bittersweet and the characters are so flawed and yet beautiful. It’s not possible not to love the books. And this was no exception. with gratitude to netgalley and ecco for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review
I think this was a 3.5 star read for me but I bumped it up because i learned a lot about history while I was reading it and I felt grateful that this book is out there. It’s a tough subject and I will say that much of it was tough to read but I am still glad I read it.
“It’s a terrible moment for all kids when we realize that our parents can’t protect us. That we won’t be able to protect our own. That the whole world can come and take us whenever it likes.” I have loved every book Backman has written. I have loved the Beartown series so very much and I wasn’t sure I was prepared to read another book on it and I also wasn’t sure I was prepared for it to end. I loved this small town with its broken and violent and struggling and loving people. I both wanted to swallow this book up in one sitting and also savor every single moment I spent with it. I wanted to go slowly and yet I couldn’t stop reading it. These characters are all so real, they jump off the page and they pull you into their lives. You fall in love with each of them in unique and inexplicable ways. “There ought to be a different word for it once you’ve been married for enough years. When you’ve long since passed the point where it stopped feeling like a choice. I no longer choose you every morning, that was a beautiful thing we said on our wedding day, I just can’t imagine life without you now. We aren’t freshly blooming flowers, we’re two trees with intertwined roots, you’ve grown old within me.” And even though you know the book is going to break your heart, you know it from the first line because Backman tells you, you can’t stop hoping that it won’t happen. You can’t stop falling apart when it does even though he’s warned you again and again. Because you’re so invested in these characters and you’ve grown to love them so very much. Backman has a way of creating characters that are so flawed and yet still so lovable. He has a way of getting to the heart of what makes us each human and pulling out the essence of his characters. Once you’ve seen their beauty, even in the midst of all the terrible things they do, you can’t help but root for them. Every single character in this book is three dimensional, flawed and broken and also extraordinary. They are showing up to life. Facing it head on. You can’t help but root for even the most irredeemable ones. “All children are victims of their parents’ childhoods, because all adults try to give their kids what they themselves enjoyed or lacked. In the end everything is either a revolt against the adults we encountered or an attempt to copy them. That’s why someone who hated their own childhood often has greater empathy than someone who loved theirs. Because someone who had a hard time dreamed of other realities, but someone who had it easy can hardly imagine that things could be any different. We take happiness so easily for granted if we’ve had it from the start.” There’s so much in this book, like all of them. So much about parenting, marriage, community, love, friendship, family. So much heart. I loved every single minute I spent with it. I was worried it would be too many pages and in the end it felt like not nearly enough because these characters will stay with me forever. with gratitude to atria books and netgalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review
Love love loved the characters in this story. Loved the diversity of their backgrounds and how it was handled. Loved the story. Loved all the food and all the fun. Enjoyable, light read.
3.5 stars. I enjoyed this essay collection and loved the parts where I felt the author went deep into what it means to start over and give oneself grace and space. In some ways, I felt like maybe she hadn’t spent enough time in this new life yet to really dig deep enough to pull out all of her learnings/lessons. Like it was still all a bit too new. So it still felt a bit more on the surface than I would have liked. Still enjoyed them. |
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