Book Review: The Dilemma: A Novel by B. A. Paris-Mystery/Thriller

Hello dear Readers,

My book review of The Dilemma: A Novel by B. A. Paris.

Title: The Dilemma: A Novel

Rating: 4/5 Stars

Genre: Mystery/Thriller

Author: B. A. Paris

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Publication Date: June 30, 2020

Language: English

Hardcover: 352 pages
Meet the Author: B. A. Paris
Buy Me: Amazon

Book Description

Knowing the truth will destroy her. Keeping it secret will destroy him.

It’s Livia’s 40th birthday, and her husband Adam is throwing her the party of a lifetime to make up for the wedding they never had. Everyone she loves will be there, except her daughter Marnie, who’s studying abroad. 

But although Livia loves Marnie, she’s secretly glad she won’t be there. Livia has recently uncovered a secret about their daughter which, if revealed, will shake the foundation of their family to its core. She needs to tell Adam, but she’s waiting until the party is over so they can have this last happy time together.

Adam, meanwhile, has his own surprise for his wife: he’s arranged for Marnie to secretly fly back for the family celebration. But during the day, he hears some terrible news and he too is faced with a dilemma.

How far would you go to give someone you love a last few hours of happiness?

Thank you Netgalley and St. Martin's Press for the advanced free copy in exchange for an honest review. 

My Thoughts

I have been a B.A. Paris fan since the publication of her first book, Behind Closed Doors. Super excited every time a new book comes out, and with The Dilemma was not different.

B.A. Paris never disappoints. I still love her writing style, and how unique the characters and the stories are. The Dilemma is not as dark as Behind Closed Door for example, in my opinion, however, what remains the same for me is unforgettable characters and unexpected twists in the stories, which makes her books so different from all the others in the same genre. I would definitely recommend this for B.A. Paris fans and also if you are looking for a great thriller. 

Thank you St. Martin's Press and Netgalley for the free advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Wendy

Blog Tour: Sister Dear by Hannah Mary McKinnon-Mystery & Thrillers

BLOG TOUR: SISTER DEAR

Welcome to the Blog Tour for Sister Dear by Hannah Mary McKinnon

BOOK SUMMARY

In Hannah Mary McKinnon’s psychological thriller, SISTER DEAR (MIRA Trade; May 26, 2020; $17.99), the obsession of Single White Female meets the insidiousness of You, in a twisted fable about the ease of letting in those who wish us harm, and that mistake dire consequences.

The day he dies, Eleanor Hardwicke discovers her father – the only person who has ever loved her – is not her father. Instead, her biological father is a wealthy Portland businessman who wants nothing to do with her and to continue his life as if she doesn’t exist. That isn’t going to work for Eleanor.

Eleanor decides to settle the score. So, she befriends his daughter Victoria, her perfect, beautiful, carefree half-sister who has gotten all of life’s advantages while Eleanor has gotten none.

As she grows closer to Victoria, Eleanor’s obsession begins to deepen. Maybe she can have the life she wants, Victoria’s life, if only she can get close enough. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hannah Mary McKinnon was born in the UK, grew up in Switzerland and moved to Canada in 2010.

After a successful career in recruitment, she quit the corporate world in favor of writing, and is now the author of The Neighbors and Her Secret Son.

She lives in Oakville, Ontario, with her husband and three sons, and is delighted by her twenty-second commute.

EXCERPT

Chapter 1

The police didn’t believe me.

A jury wouldn’t have, either, if I’d gone on trial, and most definitely not the judge. My attorney had more than a few reservations about my story. Ms. Allerton hadn’t said as much. She didn’t need to. I saw it in her eyes, could tell by the way she shuffled and reshuffled her papers, as if doing so might shake my lies clean off the pages, leaving only the truth behind in her inky, royal blue swirls.

After our first meeting I’d concluded she must’ve known early on—before she shook my hand with her icy fingers—that I was a liar. Before she’d walked into the room in shiny, four-inch heels, she’d no doubt decided she’d heard my excuses, or a variation thereof, from countless clients already. I was yet another person claiming to be innocent. Another criminal who’d remained adamant they’d done nothing wrong, it wasn’t their fault, honest, despite the overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary, a wall of impending doom surrounding me.

And still, at the time I’d believed the only reason Ms. Allerton had taken on my case pro-bono was because of the amount of publicity it gave her firm. Reducing my sentence—for there would be one—would amplify her legacy as a hot-shot lawyer. I’d accepted her help. There was no other option. I needed her knowledge, her expertise, saw her as my final hope. I now know her motivations were something else I’d miscalculated. All hope extinguished. Game over.

If I’m being fair, the judgements Ms. Allerton and other people had made about me weren’t completely wrong. I had told lies, some, anyway. While that stripped away part of my claim to innocence, it didn’t mean I was entirely guilty. Not of the things everybody said I’d done. Things I’d had no choice but to confess to, despite that being my biggest lie of all.

But I’ll tell you the truth. The whole truth and nothing but. I’ll start at the beginning, and share everything that happened. Every last detail leading up to one fateful night. The night someone died because of me. The night I lost you, too.

I won’t expect your forgiveness. Our relationship—or lack thereof—will have gone way beyond that point. No. All I can hope for, is that my side of the story will one day help you understand why I did the things I did.

And why I have to do the things I’ve not yet done.

Excerpted from Sister Dear by Hannah Mary McKinnon, Copyright © 2020 by Hannah McKinnon. 

Published by MIRA Books

BUY LINKS/SOCIAL LINKS

SISTER DEAR

Author: Hannah Mary McKinnon

ISBN: 9780778309550

Publication Date: May 26, 2020

Publisher: MIRA Books

Buy Links: 

Harlequin 

Barnes & Noble

Amazon

Books-A-Million

Powell’s

Social Links:

Author Website

Twitter: @HannahMMcKinnon

Instagram: @hannahmarymckinnon

Facebook: @HannahMaryMcKinnon

Goodreads

Thank you to Lia Ferrone at Harlequin Trade Publishing for inviting me to the Blog Tour.

Book Review: Untamed by Glennon Doyle-Memoir/Self Help

Hello dear Readers,

Below my book review of Untamed by Glennon Doyle.

Title: Untamed

Rating: 5/5 Stars

Genre: Memoir/Self Help

Author: Glennon Doyle

Publisher: The Dial Press
Publication Date: March 10, 2020

Language: English

Hardcover: 352 pages
Meet the Author: Glennon Doyle
Buy Me: Amazon

Book Description

This is how you find yourself.

There is a voice of longing inside each woman. We strive so mightily to be good: good partners, daughters, mothers, employees, and friends. We hope all this striving will make us feel alive. Instead, it leaves us feeling weary, stuck, overwhelmed, and underwhelmed. We look at our lives and wonder: Wasn’t it all supposed to be more beautiful than this? We quickly silence that question, telling ourselves to be grateful, hiding our discontent—even from ourselves.

For many years, Glennon Doyle denied her own discontent. Then, while speaking at a conference, she looked at a woman across the room and fell instantly in love. Three words flooded her mind: There She Is. At first, Glennon assumed these words came to her from on high. But she soon realized they had come to her from within. This was her own voice—the one she had buried beneath decades of numbing addictions, cultural conditioning, and institutional allegiances. This was the voice of the girl she had been before the world told her who to be. Glennon decided to quit abandoning herself and to instead abandon the world’s expectations of her. She quit being good so she could be free. She quit pleasing and started living.

Soulful and uproarious, forceful and tender, Untamed is both an intimate memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live. It is the story of navigating divorce, forming a new blended family, and discovering that the brokenness or wholeness of a family depends not on its structure but on each member’s ability to bring her full self to the table. And it is the story of how each of us can begin to trust ourselves enough to set boundaries, make peace with our bodies, honor our anger and heartbreak, and unleash our truest, wildest instincts so that we become women who can finally look at ourselves and say: There She Is.

Untamed shows us how to be brave. As Glennon insists: The braver we are, the luckier we get.

My Thoughts

I have never read a book like Glennon Doyle's Untamed.

It is a book that makes you stop for a moment, be still, and think how you have been living your entire life. All the things that you learn and acquire your whole life, what they really mean.  

All the feelings, and thoughts and behaviours. All the circumstances, the pain, the patterns we follow because that is what we have been thought is the right thing to do, the correct way to live our lives. But also the joy, happiness and satisfaction that comes with living, with being present, with fighting for your beautiful, as she calls it. For finding yourself. 

Untamed, is an eye-opening book, and also an opportunity to find yourself in a world where we are told who we are supposed to be, what we are supposed to be. 

"I can't imagine a greater tragedy than remaining forever unknown to myself. That could the ultimate self-abandonment."

"What we believe, we become."

Wendy

Book Review: Children of the Land: A Memoir by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo-Memoir

Hello dear Readers,

Below my book review of Children of the Land: A Memoir by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo.

Title: Children of the Land: A Memoir

Rating: 5/5 Stars

Genre: Memoir

Author: Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

Publisher: Harper
Publication Date: January 28, 2020

Language: English

Hardcover: 384 pages
Meet the Author: Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
Buy Me: Amazon

Book Description

An Entertainment Weekly, The Millions, and LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2020

This unforgettable memoir from a prize-winning poet about growing up undocumented in the United States recounts the sorrows and joys of a family torn apart by draconian policies and chronicles one young man’s attempt to build a future in a nation that denies his existence.

“You were not a ghost even though an entire country was scared of you. No one in this story was a ghost. This was not a story.”

When Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was five years old and his family was preparing to cross the border between Mexico and the United States, he suffered temporary, stress-induced blindness. Castillo regained his vision, but quickly understood that he had to move into a threshold of invisibility before settling in California with his parents and siblings. Thus began a new life of hiding in plain sight and of paying extraordinarily careful attention at all times for fear of being truly seen. Before Castillo was one of the most celebrated poets of a generation, he was a boy who perfected his English in the hopes that he might never seem extraordinary.

With beauty, grace, and honesty, Castillo recounts his and his family’s encounters with a system that treats them as criminals for seeking safe, ordinary lives. He writes of the Sunday afternoon when he opened the door to an ICE officer who had one hand on his holster, of the hours he spent making a fake social security card so that he could work to support his family, of his father’s deportation and the decade that he spent waiting to return to his wife and children only to be denied reentry, and of his mother’s heartbreaking decision to leave her children and grandchildren so that she could be reunited with her estranged husband and retire from a life of hard labor.

Children of the Land distills the trauma of displacement, illuminates the human lives behind the headlines and serves as a stunning meditation on what it means to be a man and a citizen.

My Thoughts

In this moment in time, I am so proud and glad there are so many Latino writers out there sharing their stories, being vulnerable and knowing that, even if afraid, they share these stories with the world anyway. 

Memoir is a genre I love. I devour these books, and as I writer serves my as one more way to inspire me and keep going with my own writing. Lately, I have been more inclined to read memoirs on border stories, undocumented immigrants, because I think it is important to read it from the people that actually goes through it than just assume or believe what the media or other people want us to believe. I don't want to generalize, and most important, these stories teach me that our writing has to have purpose. 

Reading Marcelo's story was hard because, unconsciously, you can't help but think, how can he, anybody go through so much. How these type of situations happen?. But then I remember, that is the whole purpose of him sharing his story, at least for me as a reader, to understand, to hear it from the true source, if you will.

Wendy

Book Review: My Dark Vanessa: A Novel by Kate Elizabeth Russell-Psychological Fiction

Hello dear Readers,

My book review of My Dark Vanessa: A Novel by Kate Elizabeth Russell.

Title: My Dark Vanessa: A Novel

Rating: 5/5 Stars

Genre: Psychological Fiction

Author: Kate Elizabeth Russell
Publisher: William Morrow

Publication Date: March 10, 2020

Language: English

Hardcover: 384 Pages
Meet the Author: Kate Elizabeth Russell
Buy Me: Amazon

Book Description

Exploring the psychological dynamics of the relationship between a precocious yet naïve teenage girl and her magnetic and manipulative teacher, a brilliant, all-consuming read that marks the explosive debut of an extraordinary new writer.

2000. Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful forty-two-year-old English teacher.

2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa, and now Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past. But how can Vanessa reject her first love, the man who fundamentally transformed her and has been a persistent presence in her life? Is it possible that the man she loved as a teenager—and who professed to worship only her—may be far different from what she has always believed?

Alternating between Vanessa’s present and her past, My Dark Vanessa juxtaposes memory and trauma with the breathless excitement of a teenage girl discovering the power her own body can wield. Thought-provoking and impossible to put down, this is a masterful portrayal of troubled adolescence and its repercussions that raises vital questions about agency, consent, complicity, and victimhood. Written with the haunting intimacy of The Girls and the creeping intensity of Room, My Dark Vanessa is an era-defining novel that brilliantly captures and reflects the shifting cultural mores transforming our relationships and society itself.

My Thoughts

My Dark Vanessa is a work of fiction. Even the author clarifies is not her personal story, nor anybody else's. However, it read like non-fiction to me. Could be because the subject on this book is a very real situation, which happens in real life, or because the excellent writing . Either way, personally, I just loved it read that way because I wanted her story, Vanessa's story to feel as much real, valid.

Needless to say, I loved this book. It is indeed a very sensitive subject, and it was hard to read at times, but I think the book had the intended effect, at least on me, which has to really listen to this story, and to see Vanessa, and what she goes through.

Vanessa is one of the most vulnerable characters I have ever encountered in a book. She is not afraid of her truth, she is not afraid of admitting what happened and let others know, she even takes responsibility, which I don't believe was all her fault, but at the end, she just wanted her story to be real because like most humans, she wanted to feel loved and understood, and get validation on her feelings, even if that meant to blame herself for how things turned out. 

Vanessa, the teenager, the student, and Jacob, the grown-up adult, her teacher, get involved in a romantic relationship. Through the pages, we see how their relationship starts, develops, and ends. However, I don't think it really ended. Deep inside I believe, at least for Vanessa, she always hoped it was going to turn out the way she always wanted, a real love story, for Jacob, for everybody else in the world. Other women come forward and accuse Jacob of sexual misconduct, and even though Vanessa never really felt like a victim, some of these women tried to get her to tell her story, to see that what she went through was the same abuse they experienced, that Vanessa was obligated to share what happened for the sake of her stories to be true.

I also loved how the story alternates between the past and the present. It was a fast-paced read, but at the same time you get to experience and breath every word of it. 

My Dark Vanessa, fiction, non-fiction, is a very important and real story.

Wendy