natreadthat's reviews
391 reviews

challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

Shelby Tebow goes out for a late night run and doesn’t come back. Not long after, Meredith and her six-year-old daughter Delilah also go missing. The lack of answers sets the town on edge until both cases go cold.

Fast forward eleven years: Delilah escapes her captors and the dark, dingy basement she’s been trapped in. Suddenly she’s back home with her dad and brother, but the reunion doesn’t bring the peace they were hoping for. Instead, Delilah’s return brings back questions about what really happened all those years ago.

Told from the point of views of Delilah, Meredith, the brother Leo, and the neighbor Kate, the novel spans across eleven years ago and present day. Local Woman Missing is full of twists and turns that will have you naming a new suspect every few chapters and guessing until the very end.

I enjoyed it until the last few chapters where I personally felt like some logistics were impossible to add up. Still a good read though.

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Instructions for Dancing by Nicola Yoon

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring lighthearted reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

“Is love worth the heartbreak and sorrow that can come with it?”

Evie is suddenly cursed with the ability to see the beginning, middle, and end of any couples’ relationship when she witnesses them kiss. It is turning her world sour and discouraging her from feeling things…until she meets X.

Her visions lead her to the La Brea Dance Studio, where she agrees to enter a ballroom dance competition with the beautiful, say “yes” to everything, X. As they twirl around the dance floor hand-in-hand and learn the steps of each new dance, she realizes she’s learning how to feel again.

This book was a cute story that sucked me in. I enjoyed the subtle (and not so subtle) reminders that this is the only life we get. It is full of heartbreak, loss, anger, love, forgiveness, and more.

PS - Isn’t that cover just delightful? 🤩

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I Wish I Never Met You: Dating the Shiftless, Stupid, and Ugly a Novel by Denise N. Wheatley

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funny hopeful lighthearted medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

If you’ve ever been on a disastrous date, you’ll know exactly where Denise N. Wheatley is coming from. This novel showcases the shiftless, stupid, ugly men she’s gone through on her journey to find True Love.

Part cringy, part hilarious, you’ll find yourself chuckling at her relatability and the sometimes-outlandish ways she has dealt with the men of her past.

This was a quick, easy read full of humor and lightness. Sometimes laughter is the only way to get through horrors of dating.

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It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover

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challenging dark emotional hopeful sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

It Ends With Us has been making waves in the book world and I didn’t love it like everyone else.

Lily Bloom has finally made it to Boston. When she meets tall, handsome Ryle, an instant connection is there, but they want different things. He wants a one-night stand and she wants a lasting relationship. As their paths continue to cross, they soon can’t get enough of each other.

It’s hard to say much without spoilers, but I think it’s a fair warning that domestic abuse is a recurring, and at times, graphic, theme. This was an important story that covers the realities of domestic abuse and one I know Colleen Hoover holds dear to her heart.

It was written well, yet I personally couldn’t connect with the lovey-dovey scenes laced throughout it. They didn’t feel believable to me. But to be fair, I typically don’t read romance novels, which may be why I was rolling my eyes at most of the romance scenes in this book.

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Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci

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emotional funny informative lighthearted reflective medium-paced

5.0

Due to a recent jaw injury that calls for a strict diet of soups, smoothies, and other mush, this book was slightly torturous for me.

I’ve always loved Stanley Tucci, from his lovable acting in The Devil Wears Prada to the utter creepiness in The Lovely Bones to his bartending videos on Instagram. So is it really a surprise that I loved his memoir on food…FOOD?!

Taste is full of delicious recipes I can’t wait to try, humor (“this recipe calls for a f*ckton of butter”), and stories from Tucci’s personal life (ya know, outside of what we see on the big screen). And it’s always a plus when the audio book is read by the author.

*chefs kiss*

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Verity by Colleen Hoover

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dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

I went into my first ever first Colleen Hoover novel totally blind and daaaamn, what a mindf*ck.

When Lowen Ashleigh is hired to co-author the last three books of Verity Crawford’s best-selling series, it’s practically a godsend that will save her from being broke, evicted, and jobless.

Lowen temporarily moves into the Crawford residence to begin her research for the novels. While looking through Verity’s office, Lowen discovers a dark, disturbing manuscript detailing the devastating tragedies that Verity and her husband, Jeremy, have experienced. The secrets in the manuscript are enough to make Lowen second-guess Verity’s coma-like state, how Jeremy can remain with her, and if it’s safe for anyone to be in the house with Verity.

This was one seriously twisted thriller, with spicy romance scenes, plot-twists at every corner, and a wild ending. I devoured it in two days simply because I couldn’t put it down (sorry, work).

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Wild by Cheryl Strayed

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

First book of the year and it was a great one!

After losing her mother to cancer, her close-knit family falling apart, a divorce, and a stint with heroin, Cheryl is desperate for solace. Impulsively, she decides to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs thousands of miles from the Mexico border through California, Oregon, and Washington all the way to Canada. With only her will as her motivation, Cheryl sets out alone with no training and almost no money. It’s on the trail, somewhere between the Mojave Desert and the Washington Bridge of the Gods, that she faces her demons, both past and present.

Wild is a memoir chock-full of raw emotion, adventure, and a different type of coming-of-age. This is neither a how-to book for the PCT or a self-help book, it’s merely a story of how one young woman found her own way to heal.

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Hunting by Stars by Cherie Dimaline

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

From The Marrow Thieves, French is back in this gripping sequel.

It picks up where we left off—in a ravaged world where Indigenous people are hunted for their bone marrow, which is believed to bring back dreams. French and his found family are still on the run, willing to do anything to stay out of the hands of the Recruiters.

When French is captured and ends up at a school, he must decide how far he’s willing to go to escape. On the outside, his family is deciding the same thing. Through brutal trials, questions of character, love, loss, and everything in between, we see what freedom means for this family.

Dimaline captures a fictionalized version of the very real residential schools that took place in the US and Canada, where Indigenous people were sent to boarding schools to sever their cultures and traditions. It is a harrowing look into North America’s history and a reminder of what happened right under the soles of our feet.

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Firekeeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Angeline Boulley’s stunning debut novel is one of my favorite books of the year! It’s dripping in authentic Native American tradition, language, medicine, and history. I loved being immersed so deeply into the culture. As a non-Indigenous reader, it truly felt like a gift to learn so much about it.

Vividly set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Daunis is an eighteen-year-old, unenrolled tribal member of the Native American Ojibwe community. She is incredibly smart, a great hockey player, and dreams of studying medicine, but that doesn’t mean she fits in. Either way, she’s off to college at the University of Michigan soon enough.

Her plans change after a heartbreaking pair of events—her uncle’s sudden death and her beloved Grandmary’s stroke. When she meets Jamie, the handsome new hockey player on her brother’s team, things start looking up and she hopes that “bad things come in threes” is just a myth.

Another tragedy does find Daunis, which leads to her going undercover as a confidential informant with the FBI. Her goal? Find out who’s selling a new type of meth in her community. As the meth epidemic spreads, she has to navigate her own personal struggles with family, love, and hardship while pushing forward to solve the case.

Firekeeper’s Daughter was incredible and I was completely captivated. The audiobook is so well done; I loved hearing the language and voices for each character. By the end of the book, I was sad to be done. This is a must read!

Angeline Boulley’s story is also noteworthy: a storyteller who is an enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. The idea for this book came to her when she was a senior in high school, but she didn’t start writing it until she was 44, and published it at 54. Boulley explores the realities that Indigenous people face, most of which rarely get any mention in mainstream media. This book is a masterpiece in more ways than one.

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Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

pa•chin•ko /pəˈCHiNGkō/ (noun):

1. a Japanese form of pinball.

The Pachinko saga follows four generations of a Korean family, their move to Japan, the discrimination they face, and the hardships they work to overcome.

After getting pregnant with a married man, Sunja does what she thinks is best for the child and agrees to marry a kind minister staying at her mother’s boarding house. The marriage provides her child with a father, giving it a chance at a future, and she moves to Osaka, Japan. As the story unfolds, we learn what it’s like to be Korean in Japan. The family faces the challenges of finding stability, dealing with a powerful father seeking out his child, and the relationships that build throughout the generations.

This book did an incredible job of portraying the mid-20th century history and dynamic between the Koreans and Japanese; I learned an incredible amount from it. It was full of rich history and a plethora of characters. That being said, I had a hard time connecting with many of the characters and didn’t love the frequent, and sometimes abrupt, context switching.

Overall, Pachinko is a very well written book that just wasn’t my cup of tea.

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natreadthat's reviews 391 reviews

natreadthat's reviews
391 reviews