It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? #SundayPost #SundaySalon

 

Linking to: It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? at BookDate; Sunday Post @ Caffeinated Reviewer; and the Sunday Salon @ ReaderBuzz

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Life…

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I mean, it’s been a week – cook, clean, read, write, watch, sleep…repeat 🤷🏻‍♀️

Daughter #1 has made the odd visit to pick up bits and pieces she’s left behind. My youngest son is eager to move into his sister’s still not quite empty room. My eldest son is halfway through his final exams. Daughter #2 will be coming home for the summer holidays in two weeks or so. Hubby had to have a colonoscopy, he won’t see the surgeon until December, but the nurse said things look good.

 

I’m looking forward to the start of Nonfiction November next week! There are weekly prompts, as well as an Instagram challenge. For more information on how to participate check out any of the hosts – Katie @ Doing Dewey, Rennie @ What’s Nonfiction, Christopher @ Plucked from the Stacks, Rebekah @ She Seeks Nonfiction, Jaymi @ The OC Bookgirl

You might like to combine it with the Nonfiction November event hosted by ABookOlive on YouTube. Olive supplies four words, this year they are – *Record *Element *Border *Secret, and encourages you to read nonfiction that fulfils one or more of the prompts.

I will mostly be focusing on completing my own 2022 Nonfiction Reader Challenge goal, for which I have five books still to read, but I also have a few other nonfiction books I’m hoping to read as well. FYI I’ll be posting sign ups for the 2023 Nonfiction Reader Challenge, hosted by me here at Book’d Out, in mid November.

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What I’ve Read Since I last Posted…

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Double Lives by Kate MacCaffrey

Keeping Up Appearances by Trish Stringer

Runt by Craig Silvey

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

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New Posts…

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Review: All That’s Left Unsaid byTracey Lien

Review: Double Lives by Kate McCaffrey

Review: Fairy Tale by Stephen King

Review: The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake

Bookshelf Bounty

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What I’m Reading This Week…

 

Who decides which stories are worth telling?

Maggie Banks’s life is a bit of a mess. After losing a job and moving back home with her parents, she’s desperate for a new Life Plan. So when her best friend asks for help running her struggling bookstore in the quaint town of Bells River, Maggie jumps on the opportunity. She doesn’t even like books, per se, but anything’s better than obsessively checking job boards from her childhood bedroom.

It turns out Maggie’s not prepared for small-town life. More specifically, the strict rules enforced by the local historical society: the bookstore is only allowed to sell “classics”. But with a town full of people looking for fresh stories, Maggie knows she’ll have to get creative to keep the store afloat.

And so begins Maggie’s underground book club: fun, goofy, and totally against the rules. Catering to the stories folks actually want to read and making fun of the stuffy “classics”, Maggie falls in love with books and realizes the power stories have to build community. But with a historical society itching to catch her and shut her down for good, and a budding relationship with an adorably strait-laced inspector weighing on her conscience, everything starts to fall apart. And just as Maggie feels herself becoming a part of the community, she unearths a town secret that could ruin everything. She’ll have to figure out what’s more important: the books that formed a small town’s history, or the stories poised to change it all.

A warm, funny book club read about community, finding yourself, and the transformative power of stories, The Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks is a much-needed novel perfect for readers of The Storied Life of AJ Fikry and The Bookish Life of Nina Hill.

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In September 1883, the South Australian town of Fairly huddles under strange, vivid sunsets. Six-year-old Denny Wallace has gone missing during a dust storm, and the whole town is intent on finding him. As they search the desert and mountains for the lost child, the residents of Fairly – newlyweds, landowners, farmers, mothers, artists, Indigenous trackers, cameleers, children, schoolteachers, widows, maids, policemen – explore their own relationships with the complex landscape unsettling history of the Flinders Ranges.

The colonial Australia of The Sun Walks Down is unfamiliar, multicultural, and noisy with opinions, arguments, longings and terrors. It’s haunted by many gods – the sun among them, rising and falling on each day that Denny could be found, or lost forever.

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A fallen regime. A missing child. A chance at freedom.

By the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Divergent, Poster Girl is a haunting adult dystopian mystery that explores the expanding role of surveillance on society – an inescapable reality that we welcome all too easily.

WHAT’S RIGHT IS RIGHT. Sonya Kantor knows this slogan – she lived by it for most of her life. For decades, everyone in the Seattle-Portland megalopolis lived under it, as well as constant surveillance in the form of the Insight, an ocular implant that tracked every word and every action, rewarding or punishing by a rigid moral code set forth by the Delegation.

Then there was a revolution. The Delegation fell. Its most valuable members were locked in the Aperture, a prison on the outskirts of the city. And everyone else, now free from the Insight’s monitoring, went on with their lives.

Sonya, former poster girl for the Delegation, has been imprisoned for ten years when an old enemy comes to her with a deal: find a missing girl who was stolen from her parents by the old regime, and earn her freedom. The path Sonya takes to find the child will lead her through an unfamiliar, crooked post-Delegation world where she finds herself digging deeper into the past – and her family’s dark secrets – than she ever wanted to.

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Carol is a divorced teacher living in a small town in Ireland, her only son now grown. A second chance at love brings her unexpected connection and belonging. The new relationship sparks local speculation: what does a woman like her see in a man like that? What happened to his wife who abandoned them all those years ago? But the gossip only serves to bring the couple closer.

When Declan becomes ill, things start to fall apart. His children are untrusting and cruel, and Carol is forced to leave their beloved home with its worn oak floors and elegant features and move back in with her parents.

Carol’s mother is determined to get to the bottom of things, she won’t see her daughter suffer in this way. It seems there are secrets in Declan’s past, strange rumours that were never confronted and suddenly the house they shared takes on a more sinister significance.

In his tense and darkly comic new novel Norton casts a light on the relationship between mothers and daughters, and truth and self-preservation with unnerving effect.

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Thanks for stopping by!

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? #IMWAYR @thebookdate #SundayPost @Kimbacaffeinate #SundaySalon @debnance #ForeverHome #TheBannedBookshopofMaggieBanks #PosterGirl #TheSunWalksDown