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Brynn is a high school student who recently received an internship at a true-crime TV show after pitching that they cover the murder of her middle school teacher, Mr. Larkin. This means that she’ll be going back to that private school, with all the same classmates, to do a little spying (though she doesn’t like to call it that), with the goal of solving it. When the murder occurred, there were thr...

Leigh is a lawyer who work on cases for women who have been sexually harassed, typically by ex-boyfriends, and it seems like a lot of her cases involve revenge porn. Brandon is a detective who recently picked up a missing persons case, where said missing person is one of Leigh’s clients. Like most main characters in a book like this, the lawyer gets a bit TOO involved in trying to solve the case,...

Shadow and Bone is about a girl named Alina Starkov, who always thought she was less than ordinary. As a mapmaker in the Second Army, she is one of many that are chosen to cross through the Fold, a barrier between East and West Ravka that is dark and filled with creepy flying monsters. During the crossing, they’re attacked by the Volcra. She is so desperate to save her best friend, Mal, that she u...

The Viscount Who Loved Me is the second book in the Bridgerton series by Julia Quinn. Another Regency era romance, this one follows the oldest Bridgerton brother, Anthony, who has declared that he will be getting married this season. He is initially interested in Edwina Sheffield because she meets all of the criteria on his checklist for a wife that he would be comfortable procreating with, but wo...

This memoir represents Tom Felton's reflection on his own life growing up in the film industry, including the iconic role of Draco Malfoy that he is probably most known for, though he’s been in other films and in television. He focuses a lot of the memoir on his time filming the Harry Potter movies, which isn’t surprising because those films took up a significant portion of his adolescence. H...

Minnie was born on January 1, minutes after Quinn, who was declared the first baby born in London that year and won a bunch of money for it. Minnie’s mother says she was jinxed from the start because Quinn stole her name and now, every New Year, lots of slightly unfortunate things happen to Minnie. She loses her coat, or she gets evicted from her apartment, or she gets locked in a bathroom all nig...

For our last episode of 2022 we wanted to recap everything we’ve read so far this year, both for our podcast buddy-reads and as individuals who don’t always read everything together. We are excited to return refreshed and ready to read some new books in 2023. Check out our Instagram and/or Facebook page to participate in the reading challenge we’ve designed for 2023. We’d love to see and hear abou...

A Touch of Darkness is a retelling of the Greek story of Hades, the God of the Dead, and Persephone, the Goddess of Spring. Persephone had been hidden from the world by her mother, Demeter, but eventually convinced her to let her live a more mortal life in New Athens, where she’s attending college. Her best friend Lexa convinces her to go to a local club, Nevernight, to celebrate getting an intern...

I'm Glad My Mom Died seems to be a collection of memories that Jennette McCurdy has surrounding her mother. This book spans from a time before her mother got her into acting as a child to one year after her mother's death from cancer, and touches on topics like emotional and physical abuse, disordered eating, hoarding, and alcohol abuse. It's pretty heavy stuff. Did we find Jennette...

Five Total Strangers begins with a blizzard that causes all the Christmas Eve flights to be canceled. Because our main character, Mira, is so desperate to get home to be with her mom on Christmas, she accepts a ride from a stranger, Harper, who sat next to her on her previous flight. Harper decided she would rent a car instead of trying to work with customer service on booking another flight. Rela...

The Haunting of Hill House was first published in 1959 by Shirley Jackson and has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It’s the story of four individuals who arrive at the notorious Hill House. This place is so frightening that people who live in the local town won’t even talk about it. The group is brought together by Dr. Montague, an anthropologists and occult scholar. He rents Hil...

A Lesson in Vengeance is about Felicity Morrow, who is a senior at an all-girls private school called Dalloway. Last year, Felicity experienced something super traumatizing, the death of her girlfriend, Alex, which she witnessed, and was institutionalized, so she’s having to go through her senior year for a second time. She’s a super senior. Felicity returns to her old room in Godwin House, an exc...

The Shining begins as Jack Torrance is interviewing for a position as the off-season caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, which sits in the mountains of Colorado. Some people say it was inspired by the real-life Stanley Hotel, though Stephen King says the Overlook is entirely fictional and doesn’t have a real-life basis. Who’s to say? Anyway, the Overlook represents a fresh start for the Torrance fami...

The Duke and I is a Regency era romance. Daphne Bridgerton has been out in society for two years, but her determination to find a love match leads her to have her brother decline the only offer for marriage she has received. Simon Basset is just returning to London from his international travels and has absolutely no plans to marry and even fewer plans to have children. He decides to attend a part...

When Nic Farrell receives a call from her brother explaining that their father is in a bad way with his dementia and they really need to sell the family home to afford the care he needs, she goes all the way back to her hometown in North Carolina to try to convince their father to sign the deed over to them. She goes back to all the things she worked so hard to escape from: an angry brother, a for...

The Deep is about mermaids, basically, that are descendants of pregnant African slave women that were tossed overboard during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The pregnant women were thrown overboard because they were in labor, and I guess that wasn’t worth the effort for the slave traders. Somehow, maybe it was magic or maybe it was the ocean, the babies that were born could breathe underwater. Onc...

The Maid was an instant New York Times bestseller when it was released at the beginning of the year. The main character, Molly, is a maid at the prestigious Regency Grand Hotel. Her usually orderly life is upset when she discovers one of the VIP guests dead in his bed. Because of her lack of social skills and her tendency to take statements very literally – sarcasm does not come across as such – s...

Beach Read is about January Andrews, who moves into her recently deceased dad’s secret second house on the shore of Lake Michigan, which happens to be right next door to her college rival, Augustus Everette. After the discovery that her father had an affair while her mom was battling cancer, she’s having a difficult time coming up with the Happily Ever After her publisher is asking for. To beat th...

It Happened One Summer is about a privileged LA socialite named Piper Bellinger who breaks into a rooftop pool to throw an “epic” and gets arrested as a result. Her stepfather decides that he’s had enough of her shenanigans and sends her to Westport, WA, to run her deceased father’s bar. Once there, she meets Brendan Taggart, a boat captain and widower, and it seems like they keep bumping into one...

Lacey May is a 14-year-old girl living with her alcoholic mother in the drought stricken town of Peaches in the Central Valley of California, which was once the center of raisin production. Residents of the town, including Lacey’s family, turned to Pastor Vern for salvation. According to Lacey’s grandmother, Cherry, Vern has summoned rain from the sky before. He thinks of himself as the reincarnat...

This book, set in a dystopian future, focuses on Wade Watts and his hunt for the Easter egg that was left by James Halliday upon his death. Finding the Easter egg would make Wade the inheritor of Halliday’s fortune and the OASIS itself, a virtual reality that basically everyone on the planet uses to escape from their reality of poverty, energy crisis, and global warming. Wade spends all his time c...

With Karey's busy work schedule, we decided to do something a little different today. We found some book related questions after a Google search and thought it would be a blast! What author(s) have we read the most from? What book most recently kept us up WAY too late? Join us as we discuss these questions and more in episode in episode ten of our spoiler-filled podcast. Questions: The questi...

This memoir tells the story of Piper Kerman, who was charged with 15 months in a minimum security federal correctional facility for drug-related money laundering. As a reckless young woman, she got mixed up with drug runners and delivered one suitcase of money. Ten years later, her past catches up with her and she is arrested. Piper looks back on her time in prison and tells her story from her arr...

It Ends With Us is about Lily Bloom, a florist, who happens to meet a neurosurgery resident named Ryle Kincaid on the day of her father’s funeral. Throughout the first half of the book, we see some flashbacks to Lily’s first relationship with Atlas when she was in high school, and to the relationship between her parents, as she’s working through some of the questions and concerns that she has abou...

Normal People focuses on the key events between two characters, Marianne and Connell, sometimes jumping forward, minuted, weeks, or months. It starts with the two of them in secondary school when they initiate a relationship that Connell wants kept secret from everyone. We also see them together at university, as their social dynamic shifts. What we REALLY see is a whole lot of miscommunication. D...