Welcome to Litsy!

We‘re ready to kick off our second year of #ReadOrDonate! Looking forward to clearing some space off my shelves and chipping away at #MountTBR . I‘ll be reading Little Fires Everywhere for January. I think I‘m the only person on the planet who hasn‘t yet read it. 🤪

Can‘t wait to see what everyone else has chosen to read. Tagging those who have expressed interest, but all are welcome. 😃

Tackle the TBR 🤓📚
What are you reading?
#boleybooks #LittleFiresEverywhere #celesteng #bookbeast #libby

"To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a place..." THIS ❤️

Shakers Heights is the perfect community nothing bad ever happens there, it is embodied by the flawless Richardson family. When Mia and her daughter arrive and the two families intertwine we find that all that glitters is not gold.

The novel explores themes of motherhood, family, privilege and race. The fight for the custody of an Asian baby between the foster white parents and the biological mother provides a very interesting discussion.

I like to keep track of California wildfires while we're traveling and as my second-born prepares for camp (we saw one large fire and one small fire in the past two weeks, and now I'm on edge). This picture from the CalFire incident map isn't of the precise areas of concern for us right now, but it made me think of the title of the tagged book.

Thank goodness for audiobooks! I started reading the physical book in September but didn‘t really connect with it & ended up moving on to other books. But I really wanted to finish it so borrowed the audio from my library. Done in 4 days! I really enjoyed this complex story where nothing is clear & even when decisions are made, you find yourself asking if the outcome was right. This will keep me thinking for a while. 4/5⭐️
(May 31, 2024)

1. I‘m a suburbs person. I‘ve lived in the suburbs my whole life. My other house I lived in from the time I was little to 18 yrs old was in the suburbs. In 2010, my mom and I moved to another house in the suburbs and we‘ve lived here ever since.

2. I read the tagged book a long time ago with a neighborhood book club I used to be in and they said that this book reminded them of our neighborhood because it‘s set in the suburbs.

#two4tuesday

Not sure how I felt on audio. Felt I barely kept with all the twists in the second half. So much going on between so many characters. Who was the real main character?? Same with the current correlation of the poor Chinese mother trying to get back her baby back from being adopted. I didn‘t know where I stood by the end. Does she who left baby at the fire station get back her baby from adoption or the rich family? Wish that was more fleshed out.

"Remember, sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too. They start over. They find a way."

February #readyourkindle

#weekendreads
@rachelsbrittain

February's #readyourkindle
@CBee
Now to figure out where these might fit in my 52 Book Challenge... Think I'll start with tagged book 🤔

Long overdue starting this one…

She was wonderful! So enjoyed this read. Well paced. Great characters. Loved it.

Sometimes you pick up fiction after reading non-fiction for so long and you remember what it's like to truly devour a story. I enjoyed this in that way! The characters did feel a bit pedestrian, rather predictable though the storyline was not. It does parse complex issues of family ties, motherhood, race, and community, which was cool.

Borrowed from Brynn during quarantine.

“Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too. They start over. They find a way.”

-Mia, Page 324

“It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?”

-Page 258

“Her conviction that it was possible if you only tried hard enough, that no work could be too messy.”

-Page 159

“It was so easy, she thought with some disdain, to find out about people. It was all out there, everything about them. You just had to look. You could figure out anything about a person if you just tried hard enough.”

-Page 151

3.5 ⭐️ for this #Roll100 pick.

Didn‘t love it quite like I did her first, but it was a nuanced and layered story.

Next up: my August #Roll100 - a #BOTMbacklog from September 2017! 🫣😬

I loved this book. So much that the next time I went to Barnes & Noble I looked for this author and bought Everything I Never Told You. I don‘t know if I even would‘ve picked up this book if my mom hadn‘t loved it and passed it on to me. And then I almost immediately went to Hulu and started watching the series which I‘m also enjoying.

Wow! This was great!! It has been on my ‘To read‘ list for a while. Every turn in this book had me riveted. Lots of themes and topics run through this book that are ripe for discussion. It was really nicely developed (no pun intended but a main character is a photographer) very cleverly written book. I will definitely be reading more by this author

Book #12 of 2023: “Little Fires Everywhere” by Celeste Ng

Michael picked this one up in Boston and I‘m really glad. It‘s the kind of fiction that nourishes the spirit. Celeste writes about issues of racism, classism, transracial adoption, redlining, mental health, abortion, and more with beautifully evocative writing.

Five stars. Definitely read this.

Do these two books even have anything in common? 😆
#GoodreadsRecommends

I really enjoyed this one. I wanted to know more. I'm definitely going to miss a few of these characters.

I have conflicting feelings* about the story itself, but am not at all conflicted about the quality: it‘s an intricate, powerful observation of family relationships & of the false, or at least fragile, security offered by social roles, rules, & constructs.

*Wondering if anyone else had really emotional reactions to the way adoption was handled?

I really enjoyed this one. I was a bit late to the game with it, just didn't “get to it“ when everyone was so into it, but so glad I picked it up eventually. I also enjoyed the show of this one too.

#July 2022 Pick

@12BooksOf2022
@Andrew65

I loved this one! This was one of our first buddy reads! 🔥

#DivineDecember
#fireplace

Meh, this book was okay. I think it was really hyped up for me, which is why I was a little disappointed reading it. I know there is a TV show and Reece loves this book, so I expected it to phenomenal (like many of her picks). But I just didn't find this book as spectacular as others did. I thought the story took a while to get going and then came to an end. I was expecting the ending because it was discussed in the first chapter.

I listened to the audio. The first half didn‘t catch my attention all that much; it was pretty slow moving. It picked up in the second half, though. I really did not like Mia. I‘m not sure there were any characters I liked, actually. I would have rated the first half “ok” at 3 stars, and wanted to up it to 3.5 stars due to the second half, but I dropped my rating just a touch as I was very unhappy with one of the things that happened near the end.

This was excellent - heartfelt, heartbreaking, frustrating, honest.

Absolutely amazing. With so many characters and unique challenges amongst all of them, the ease in which I could follow it all is 100% attributed to the authors talent. This is a very real, emotionally raw book that I would definitely read again. Why did I wait so long to read this???

Really loved reading this and then watching the series. They were super different in my opinion but I appreciated the book a bit more for the increased focus on motherhood.

Been trying to get into this Hulu Original, but it‘s a little rough. It‘s not a breezy show that I can lose myself in. I have a hard time binging this one.

Overall not my go-to read; but loved the ending where we get future dives and future speculation. Someone had lamented that the story just ends, I know what they mean but I felt that was the strength. Our time (this is pretty meta) as readers prying into the lives of others (as Mrs. R does), making their business ours is done. Life goes on (as it does for Mia) and we readers have to go on living with that too- really good summer read 4&1/2 stars.

I‘m well into the first half- pretty smooth read and liking it BUT feeling the cringey factor BIG TIME. So much so that reading this alternately makes me want to put the book down while also motivating me to read on. Strange.

So this one was good. Just didn‘t really have an ending. Like just stopped. Nothing really happened at the end.

I am gonna start the Hulu show this afternoon. Hopefully it will have more of an ending.

Might end up finishing this one today while I do some #LightChores

I decided to pick this one up for my next #AudioCommute book. Bonus is the whole Hulu series (I am enjoying the Nine Perfect Strangers Adaptation, so I am excited to finish and start the Little Fires Everywhere one).

:)

This was an easy read and fairly enjoyable throughout. But I can't help think about what is the point of the book?

There were various relationships at play between mother and daughter - biological and unbiological, but I was left unsatisfied at the end feeling a little lost. Maybe that was the point - since relationships are so complex. But I felt I wasn't given enough insight into these dynamics and just saw the surface. And then the end.

“What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?”

#Single
#MayMoms

Shout out to all of the single mothers! You‘ve got this! ❤️❤️❤️

Very good. This author, in my mind, has a very good idea of presenting and writing characters very accurately to the world around us. From the strict parenting style to the problematic children to the struggling friends, the author displays the idea that everyone has difficulties whether one realizes this or not. Not only this, but some things are kept hidden for a reason.

My February wrap up. A couple chunksters and some really excellent books. My favorites were Little Fires Everywhere, Unseen Academicals, Maid, and The Maid (Ha!)
I got a kick out of reading two books back to back with almost the same title. They are vastly different though!

I loved this book! It‘s been sitting on my shelf for a while, bookclub finally made me pick it up. The siblings and their different relationships drew me in immediately, and all of the parts of the story were equally intense.

Is the tv (Netflix?) series just as good?

So it turns out I don't hate all audio books. I'm finding I need a little mystery or thriller type action to keep me interested. All of these were fun listens.

Life in the Shaker Heights community seems normal until Mia and Lexie Warren move in. Some of the neighbors are cordial, while others are a bit bothered by their moving in. There is some class and racial differences as they begin to settle in and are forced to deal with them as the story progresses.

I kind of have a love/hate relationship with this second book by Ng. There were some parts and chapters that I liked and others I couldn‘t wait 👇