Since there's been nothing else to do besides watching Hulu and reading (never mind that I've been working my three nights a week like usual) so I, of course, have been buying books. I already shared the books I'd gotten from Book of the Month but I've gotten several books from Amazon on my Kindle and a couple mystery boxes from a local book store.
First up is my Amazon book haul. I've gotten nine Amazon eBooks on my Kindle, mostly on sale through BookBub. If you don't know what BookBub is, its a email service that emails you a daily list of eBooks that are on sale for under $5 and tailored to your preferences. In the past couple weeks I've had really good luck in my BookBub emails so I've gotten seven on sale eBooks for my Kindle and two full price ones I already wanted (one was about half-off due to accumulated credits). So here's my Kindle books so far for April:
- Serpent & Dove by Shelby Mahurin: this is a 2019 young adult fantasy novel about witches and witch hunters based around a hate-to-love romance where a witch is forced into a marriage to a witch hunter, both of whom are keeping secrets as they fall in love. This was a big book on booktube last year and I was kind of iffy on it but I'll definitely give it a try.
- I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara: this is a 2018 true crime book about the hunt for the Golden State Killer by a journalist investigating cold case. This book hit my radar due to Michelle McNamara's death while writing this book and her widower, actor Patton Oswalt's publicizing the book and the case after her death.
- The Perfect Family by Jacquie Underdown: this is a 2019 psychological thriller that I'd never even heard of but it sounds good. It's about the Radcliffe family who seem to be a typical suburban family but that's all a lie. The couples involved are all in crisis and there's a single cause and it ends up with murder.
- Wild Game by Adrienne Brodeur: this is a 2019 memoir written by a daughter about her mother and her mother's affair and the role the Adrienne herself played in that as her mother's confidante. This was a Book of the Month pick from last year that I didn't want to read enough to get it as my pick but when it popped up for sale I grabbed it up.
- An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green: a 2019 young adult sci-fi novel. I picked this up because I love John Green's books and I watch their Vlog Brothers YouTube content. I don't know much about this aside from the fact that it's a contemporary YA Sci-Fi and it's written by Hank Green and the sequel comes out in July so here we are.
- Dumplin' by Julie Murphy: this is a 2015 young adult contemporary novel about an overweight girl named Willowdean whose mom, a former beauty queen, gave her the name Dumplin'. Willowdean is comfortable as she is and things happen that cause her to enter the beauty pageant to show everyone who she is. Netflix made this into a charming looking movie with Jennifer Anniston as the mother and this book also seems charming.
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith: a semi-autobiographical 1943 novel about a poor adolescent girl and her family in Brooklyn in the early 1900s. This is a classic that somehow I've never read so I picked it up.
- The Last Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine: a 2017 mystery/thriller novel about a woman named Amber who is a nobody who uses the compassion of Mrs. Daphne Parrish to end insinuate herself into the Parrish family and their privileged world while hiding secrets of her own.
- The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M Danforth: this is a 2012 young adult contemporary about a girl named Cameron Post whose parents die and her conservative aunt and grandmother who end up sending her to a conversion camp to fix her homosexuality.
The other books I got were the results of two mystery packages from one of the local bookstores: Third Street Books in McMinnville, Oregon. Go and check out the link because they're pretty awesome. But with the Coronavirus thing going on they're only open to online and pickup orders so they're doing these mystery boxes. They cost $25 for a normal size or $50 for an extra large and you can choose your genre between: literature/general fiction, historical fiction, mystery/thriller/crime, biography/memoir, history, food & cooking, science fiction/fantasy, romance, kids 0-3, kids 4-6, kids 7-10, kids 11-13, young adult 14+, or surprise me. I got the literature/general fiction box and a historical fiction box: each came with 3 books and some goodies.
The stack on the left is the historical fiction box which had three books, one little notebook, a bookmark, a chocolate peppermint cup, and a little angel charm. The first book is Euphoria by Lily King, a 2014 novel about three female anthropologists in the jungles of New Guinea in the 1930s.
The second book is City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert, a 2019 novel by the author of Eat, Pray, Love told from the perspective of an older woman reminiscing on her youth in the New York City theater world during the 1940s.
And the last book in this box was The Paris Orphan by Natasha Lester, a 2019 novel about an American Soldier and a photographer in WWII occupied France helping to give a orphan girl her dream of having a family.
The stack on the right is the literature/general fiction box and I wasn't as excited about that one. It also came with a little branded notebook, a bookmark, a chocolate peppermint cup, and a #goals button, but with this one I got two copies of the same book and the third book is one I've already read and own (although I love it so I'll re-gift both to my sister-in-law). The first book in this box is the one I've already read and own: The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. This is a gay historical fantasy romance between Achilles and Patroclus, told from the perspective of Patroclus from their boyhood together through their relationship and to its sad ending during the Trojan War. I definitely recommend reading it, it was wonderful.
The other book I got in this box, as both a finished copy paperback and an Advanced Readers Copy (ARC) was A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum which is about the lives of conservative Arab-American women in Brooklyn: the 18 year old woman Deya who in the present is starting to meet with suitors and is given no choice about getting married as well as her mother Isra who in the past left Palestine as a teenager to marry Adam.
So that's my book haul for the middle of April. More books and reading follows.
Happy Reading!
Richelle and Emma
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