That's What She Read

Ruth Ware always delivers when it comes to interesting and layered characters. The Turn of the Key is a thrilling account of Rowan Caine's experience as a live-in nanny in a luxurious smart home unlike anything she has ever seen. This mystery is the epitome of the saying "if it's too good to be true, it probably is" because even though moving into the home of the Elincourts is an upgrade from her tiny apartment and dead-end job, it comes at a steep price. Every chapter, there is something suspicious that kept me wondering if anyone in this suspenseful book was telling the truth. Which, is obvious in the first page because Rowan is writing a letter to a lawyer, from jail, because she's being held for murder. Who is Rowan? Did she come into the Elincourt's lives for a reason? She should have known something was wrong on the day she interviewed, when one of the children warned her to never come back. With a house full of surveillance cameras and parents who ar

When a young woman is facing an unsteady future, layered on top of a very troubled past, the last thing she has time for is the strange young man who speaks in Middle English and is always following her around. Zee ignores him just fine until her sister goes missing and everything in her life is uncertain and she has no choice but to trust Gentry Frank.  "Zee may not be a princess, but Gentry is an actual knight, complete with sword, armor and a code of honor. Two years ago the voices he hears in his head called him to be Zee's champion. Both shy and autistic, he's barely spoken to her since, but has kept watch, ready to come to her aid."  The layers of this book are peeled away one by one, making it a deeply emotional and transient novel. Zee's character is complicated- she is sharp, deeply scarred but unabashedly brazen and brave. What I loved about her most was how trusted her gut even when she didn't have solid ground to stand on. Her mother is a hoard

One of my most favorite book of the summer so far!  Buy it here!  When Elin comes out with a new book, it's a must. Like a don't-even-read-the-synopsis no-brainer. Just as she delivered a multi-dimensional page turner with The Perfect Summer, Summer of '69 is just as much a treat- but with historical fiction at its core, which is a genre Elin hasn't presented before.  The story lines of several members of the Foley/Levin families intertwine as their lives during the summer of 1969 unfurl (or in some cases, unravel). There's 13-year-old Jessie, her mother Kate, and Kate's other three children, Tiger, a soldier serving in Vietnam, Kirby- a flower child with a rebellious streak and a past she's trying to run from, and Blair, who is about to give birth to twins and just made the biggest mistake of her life. At the top of the family tree is the matriarch, grandmother Exalta, who floats through the rooms of the family's sprawling Nantucket

 The Marriage Clock with Zara Raheem In Zara Raheem's fresh, funny, smart debut, a young, Muslim-American woman is given three months to find the right husband or else her traditional Indian parents will find one for her--a novel with a universal story that everyone can relate to about the challenges of falling in love. To Leila Abid's traditional Indian parents, finding a husband in their South Asian-Muslim American community is as easy as match, meet, marry. But for Leila, a marriage of arrangement clashes with her lifelong dreams of a Bollywood romance which has her convinced that real love happens  before  marriage, not the other way around. Finding the right husband was always part of her life-plan, but after 26 years of singledom, even Leila is starting to get nervous. And to make matters worse, her parents are panicking, the neighbors are talking, and she's wondering, are her expectations just too high? So Leila decides it's time to stop dreaming

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jennifer 📚 (@thats_what_she_read) on Jul 12, 2019 at 4:01pm PDT Raise your hand if you’re in the mood for a great  #historicalfiction  ! ⁣ randomhouse   #partner ⁣ } ⁣ The last HF I read was  # Montauk  by Nicola Harrison. It was a nice vacation! ⁣ ⁣ Here are the next two that are on my list: ⁣ TIME AFTER TIME By Lisa Grunwald (out now)⁣ A magical love story, inspired by the legend of a woman who vanished from Grand Central Terminal, sweeps readers from the 1920s to World War II and beyond. ⁣ On a clear December morning in 1937, at the famous gold clock in Grand Central Terminal, Joe Reynolds, a hardworking railroad man from Queens, meets a vibrant young woman who seems mysteriously out of place. Nora Lansing is a Manhattan socialite whose flapper clothing, pearl earrings, and talk of the Roaring Twenties don’t seem to match the bleak mood of Depression-era New York

It's recommendation time!  The Overdue Life of Amy Bylar by Kelly Harms is about Amy, an overworked and underappreciated mom who is in desperate need of a break. So when her guilt-ridden husband shows back up after years away and offers to take care of their kids for the summer, she accepts and escapes for New York City. I can’t blame Amy- and I am in love with her bravery and just over all attitude. Funny and refreshing! View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jennifer 📚 (@thats_what_she_read) on May 16, 2019 at 6:21pm PDT  SYNOPSIS: Overworked and underappreciated, single mom Amy Byler needs a break. So when the guilt-ridden husband who abandoned her shows up and offers to take care of their kids for the summer, she accepts his offer and escapes rural Pennsylvania for New York City. Usually grounded and mild mannered, Amy finally lets her hair down in the city that never sleeps. She discover

Book Recommendation:  How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee What it's about:  A beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel set in Singapore about a woman who survived the Japanese occupation and a man who thought he had lost everything. For fans of Min Jin Lee's Pachinko and Georgia Hunter’s We Were the Lucky Ones. Singapore, 1942. As Japanese troops sweep down Malaysia and into Singapore, a village is ransacked, leaving only two survivors and one tiny child. In a neighboring village, seventeen-year-old Wang Di is bundled into the back of a troop carrier and shipped off to a Japanese military brothel where she is forced into sexual slavery. After sixty years of silence, what she saw and experienced there still haunts her present. In the year 2000, twelve-year-old Kevin is determined to find out the truth – wherever it might lead – after his grandmother makes a surprising confession on her deathbed, one she never meant Kevin to hear, setting in motion