“My friends and I have tried cutting out sugar and just plain cutting, magnet stimulation, talking to empty chairs, herbal remedies, pulling out our hair on the bathroom floor, every therapy in the alphabet, and we still feel like we don’t deserve to live…We’re all just trying to make the best decisions we can, trying …
“When something amazing happens, it’s natural to want to tell somebody, if only to confirm that you’re not losing your mind…And this mystery was definitely stressful…First he needed to conduct some experiments,” (Brosgol 60). When Oliver’s Great-Aunt Barb whom he never met dies and leaves her apartment to his mom, it feels like a fresh …
I received this book from River Street Writing in exchange for an honest review. Caitlin Galway’s A Song for Wildcats follows characters from postwar Australia, late 1960s France, the Troubles in Ireland, 1930s New York, and 1980s Nevada who are processing grief, trauma, love, and their place in the world after facing adversity. She’s a talent of a …
I received this book from The Next Best Book Club in exchange for an honest review. “The thing about grief was that you never got used to it. It was survivable, physically, but it still hurt the same each time, like surgery without anesthesia or diving into cold water,” (Michalski 29). Long unhappy with her life and …
“You have to stomp it all down. You have to bury it. You have to bury all the messy parts and let your bright parts shine,” (Hambrock 83). Jessamyn St. Germain is a star, or she knows that soon she’s going to be one soon. One day she won’t just be an actor who occasionally books …
I received this book from River Street Writing in exchange for an honest review. “Labels are the armour that keeps us safe; they also keep us too heavy to move. They may have their uses for some, but it’s good to strip them off now and then so you can see what you’re dealing with. There’s an …
“Violence shows them how much we’re willing to give up…Violence is the only language they understand, because their system of extraction is inherently violent. Violence shocks the system. And the system cannot survive the shock,” (Kuang 397). Orphaned after a cholera outbreak in Canton, Robin Swift is brought to London by Professor Lovell, a professor at …
“There is so much darkness in Ember, Lina. It’s not just outside, it’s inside us too. Everyone has some darkness inside. It’s like a hungry creature. It wants and wants and wants with a terrible power. And the more you give it, the bigger and hungrier it gets,” (DuPrau 168). Hundreds of years ago, the city …
I received this book from River Street Writing in exchange for an honest review. “When humans sing together, even if we start in disharmony, our voices find their way unconsciously into agreement,” (“Breathe,” Bush 117). It’s taken me a while to organize my thoughts around Skin. I found it very hard to be engaged or interested in many of …
“Without faith, there is no refuge,” (Bazterrica 41). A woman living with a mysterious convent secretly documents her life with the Sacred Sisterhood after escaping a now inhabitable world destroyed by climate change. An unworthy, our narrator hopes to become one of the Enlightened and has accepted the Sisterhood as her home, but when a stranger …
Sarah O'Connor 