new reads – Simone and Her Books

New Releases Tuesday // June 4, 2019

June 4, 2019June 4, 2019by Simone3 Comments

Happy Tuesday, but most importantly, happy new releases Tuesday!

This Tuesday feels like May because the publishing train keeps on chugging and putting out some amazing reads for us this summer. We’ve got a famous Queer Eye personality publishing his novel. We have a few very interesting diverse reads coming out as well. There’s so many great ones that I put together the list of my highly anticipated. The ones with descriptions are on the top of my list, but all of these stories sound so good! I can’t wait!

Naturally Tan by Tan France

This Time Will Be Different by Misa Sugiura

I’m extremely excited for This Time Will Be Different by Misa Sugiura. First off, the cover is gorgeous. I can’t tell how this picture is rendered, but the beauty of an Asian woman’s face on the cover of this book is really thrilling. It’s not a historical novel, but it’s about a young girl who works for her family’s flower shop only to have it repossessed by the very people who they purchased it from. It also talks about the Japanese internment camps in America during WWII. In fiction, it doesn’t seem like this time period gets covered (or at least recently), so I’m excited to read something connected to it.

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

I’m kind of intrigued by this one, but I know it’ll be the big book publishing today. I feel like I have to mention it because of Elizabeth Gilbert’s success with her nonfiction novel Eat, Pray, Love. Now, Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction again with a historical story exploring sex, promiscuity, love, and a little coming of age. It’s not very high on my list, but it’s on my radar. I’ll be keeping an eye out on how reviews look for this one.

You Cannot Mess This Up by Amy Weinland Daughters

All Eyes on Us by Kit Frick

I received a copy of this book for promotion, but the story is kind of intriguing and a good inclusive read for Pride month. It’s the story of four teenagers in love. They’re in two separate relationships, but the behavior of one person is little appalling and someone threatens to expose all of their secrets if they don’t talk to them. The other couple somehow gets involved and become collateral damage to this secret someone. I’m so excited about YA thrillers lately. I’m going to enjoy this one.

Sorcery of Thorns by Margaret Rogerson

I’m slightly intrigued by this title because it’s the #1 selling novel in the YA Fantasy genre right now and that kind of statistic is hard to not look at. It’s the story of a young woman playing warden to grimoires for sorcerers (who are eeevil), but one of the books somehow escapes her. Because it was under her watch, she’s now the main suspect. However, she thens allies with a sorcerer making her question herself and her beliefs. It sounds kind of cool and I do love evil sorcerers and magic, so I might check this one out too.

Searching for Sylvie Lee by Jean Kwok

I saw my friend on Instagram read an early release of this book and she was marking pages with highlighter and there were a ton of little stickies attached to it. This book is going to be so good that I’m considering buying it. It’s a mystery of a missing girl and her family. The story follows a young Chinese family who’s eldest daughter disappears randomly. It sounds like it’ll be unpacking a lot of family secrets before getting to what happened to Sylvie. I think it’ll be good for those who love mysteries, harrowing family dramas, and diverse stories.

Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey

Ayesha at Last by Uzma Jalaluddin

The Summer We Lost Her by Tish Cohen

Full disclosure: Links will take you to Amazon. If you use these links to buy a book, it’ll give me a small commission. However, if you much rather buy indie or at Barnes and Noble, please do. Just know if you use my Amazon link, you’ll be helping me out at no additional cost.

Books, Upcoming New Releases

Book Haul – March 5, 2019

March 5, 2019March 5, 2019by Simone3 Comments

After looking over all the books I received this week, I felt like it was time for a little book haul blog post! I think it was just a coincidence that I received so many books at once. It’s probably because of all the rain we’ve been having here that my mail is delayed. It’s probably because I live in California now.

Anyway, let’s get to the books. Some of these are promotional, some of them are for review, and others are because I’m curious. I want to expand my reading life, so I try to vary my reading.

The ones I’m most excited about reading are:

Whoops, that turned out to be way more than I expected this time around. Stalker is definitely one I’m super excited about. While I’m not a huge fan of thrillers, I do like to indulge in a crime fiction every now and then. I’ve heard a lot about Lars Kepler from Abby at Crime by the Book. I think he’s one of her favorite authors, so I’m going to take that advice and try this one out.

The Weight of a Piano is one I’m also really excited about. I saw Stacey at @prose_and_palate chat up this book the other day and it’s made me super interested to see what it’s about. The story is about…a piano. It’s about the person who first owned the piano and lost it while traveling from Russia to America and the current owner of the piano. The current owner is a little lost in life and needs to sell the piano she never learned to play.

My friend, Haley, is a huge fan of Han Kang and I’ve always wanted to read her work. Her novel, The Vegetarian, is the one I’ve heard of, but I’ve also heard good things about The White Book.

The ones I’ll be promoting later this month are:

I do want to mention that books I promote are books I actually want to read. I’m very careful about the books I request and just want to promote what I want to promote. These books I’ll gladly share a little of my page. Out of all of these, Field Notes on Love is the highest on my list, but I’ve been hearing some really big things about Polaris Rising. Summon and Smoke is also an exciting one especially since it’s the author who wrote The Paper Magician series.

Some surprise mail that I’m excited about:

Foursome is definitely high on this list. It’s a nonfiction novel on the lives of four very big artists. I might give this to my sister for her to read, but I’ll take a little stab at it first.

The Guest Book is a complete mystery to me, but for some reason I’m drawn to it. It says it’s a multi-generational story that hides a big secret with their grandfather. It sounds like of intriguing and it has been a while since I’ve read a historical novel, so I might check that out.

I hope you enjoyed this little list!

I received a copy of this book from the publishers for free. My opinions have not been influenced by the publisher or the author.

Book Reviews, Books

White Fur by Jardine Libaire

July 12, 2017July 8, 2017by SimoneLeave a Comment

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Love love love is such a crazy emotion. It’ll make you happy, sad, angry, violent, giggly, stupendous, and scared for your life.

Yet we crave it like a sugar rush and we can’t stop until we have it. Our entire existence revolves around love. Without it, we would be the same people we were yesterday. White Fur proves that love can change any perspective (except maybe for old people).

The plot

32025142 When Elise Perez meets Jamey Hyde on a desolate winter afternoon, fate implodes, and neither of their lives will ever be the same. Although they are next-door neighbors in New Haven, they come from different worlds. Elise grew up in a housing project without a father and didn’t graduate from high school. Jamey is a junior at Yale, heir to a private investment bank fortune and beholden to high family expectations. The attraction is instant, and what starts out as sexual obsession turns into something greater, stranger, and impossible to ignore.

The unlikely couple moves to Manhattan in hopes of forging an adult life together, but Jamey’s family intervenes in desperation, and the consequences of staying together are suddenly severe. And when a night out with old friends takes a shocking turn, Jamey and Elise find themselves fighting not just for their love but also for their lives.

My thoughts

I had my doubts about this book. This opinion developed mostly from the writing style Jardine Libaire decided to use for this book. Choppy, one or two worded sentences to explain the euphoria of love isn’t really my style of writing. I like things simple and straightforward. This book read like I was watching Requiem for a Dream

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HOWEVER, that isn’t to say that this book was bad. No, in fact, the choppy descriptions with little-to-no context really made the story feel like you were high on love.

Elise and Jamey were two people who weren’t meant to be together. Elise is a young high school drop out living in an apartment with another guy and basically trying to get by every single day. Jamey is this uber-rich Yale undergrad who has his entire life planned out for him the moment he graduates. They weren’t meant to be.

Yet Jamey found something intriguing about the white fur of Elise’s coat and the both of them started going out. At first, it was easy to avoid the emotions. You just have sex, anywhere and any time and then you disperse. No conversation. No getting to know each other over dinner. Just sex.

But then sex turns into other feelings. It’s like they say how you can never have a friend with benefits. It’s never just friends with benefits. Each moment together was creating this whirlwind of emotions that neither anticipated to feel.

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And just like a drug, love changed them. Elise was a wild child lacking a sense of direction and future, but you can see her gruff exterior slowly smooth away to a nurturing person. She adopts a dog, she plays with kids, she finds responsibility and caring that you don’t see when you first meet her.

Jamey is this uptight rich kid who only saw Elise as sex and fun while he was away at college. Slowly, you find that he lets go a little bit and lets his inhibitions free. He’s smoking cigarettes and quitting Yale and taking on a simpler life.

The two characters evolve so much throughout the novel that by the time you realize how much they’ve changed, it’s already over.

I honestly thought this book was going to be another Gossip Girl story or something out of Gilmore Girls, but it wasn’t. It was better than that because it felt more real. Two human beings who were strangers at first find themselves and each other through love. If anything, it’s the most romantic story I’ve ever read.

Books

June 2017 Book Haul

June 26, 2017June 22, 2017by Simone1 Comment

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I recently received some lovely book mail and I couldn’t be more excited about them. Two debut novels from two new authors means that the world is filling up with more beautiful words and stories for us to read and enjoy.

Flesh and Bone and Water by Luiza Sauma

Published by Scriber Books. André is a listless Brazilian teenager and the son of a successful plastic surgeon who lives a life of wealth and privilege, shuttling between the hot sands of Ipanema beach and his family’s luxurious penthouse apartment. In 1985, when he is just sixteen, André’s mother is killed in a car accident. Clouded with grief, André, his younger brother Thiago, and his father travel with their domestic help to Belem, a jungle city on the mouth of the Amazon, where the intense heat of the rain forest only serves to heighten their volatile emotions. After they arrive back in Rio, André’s father loses himself in his work, while André spends his evenings in the family apartment with Luana, the beautiful daughter of the family’s maid.

Three decades later, and now a successful surgeon himself, André is a middle-aged father, living in London, and recently separated from his British wife. He drinks too much wine and is plagued by recurring dreams. One day he receives an unexpected letter from Luana, which begins to reveal the other side of their story, a story André has long repressed.

Everything Belongs to Us by Yoojin Grace Wuertz

Published by Random House. Seoul, 1978. At South Korea’s top university, the nation’s best and brightest compete to join the professional elite of an authoritarian regime. Success could lead to a life of rarefied privilege and wealth; failure means being left irrevocably behind.

For childhood friends Jisun and Namin, the stakes couldn’t be more different. Jisun, the daughter of a powerful business mogul, grew up on a mountainside estate with lush gardens and a dedicated chauffeur. Namin’s parents run a tented food cart from dawn to curfew. Her sister works in a shoe factory. Now Jisun wants as little to do with her father’s world as possible, abandoning her schoolwork in favor of the underground activist movement, while Namin studies tirelessly in the service of one goal: to launch herself and her family out of poverty.

But everything changes when Jisun and Namin meet an ambitious, charming student named Sunam, whose need to please his family has led him to a prestigious club: the Circle. Under the influence of his mentor, Juno, a manipulative social climber, Sunam becomes entangled with both women, as they all make choices that will change their lives forever.

I think I’m set for the rest of summer 🙂

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Book Recommendations, Books

New Release: The Song Rising by Samantha Shannon

March 20, 2017March 15, 2017by SimoneLeave a Comment

OMG I don’t know about you, but I am a huge fan of The Bone Season series. If you’re just as big a fan as I am, then you probably feel the same way I do: why does it take a million years for this author to put out a new book?

Seriously, The Bone Season was released back in 2013 and then The Mime Order came out two years ago. We’re finally on the third book and from what I heard before the first novel came out, she’s got a whole seven-book series or something like that. I’ll be dead before that even happens!

But despite the time, I’m super excited about this book. Here’s a synopsis from the first novel to give you an idea of the series:

The year is 2059. Nineteen-year-old Paige Mahoney is working in the criminal underworld of Scion London, based at Seven Dials, employed by a man named Jaxon Hall. Her job: to scout for information by breaking into people’s minds. For Paige is a dreamwalker, a clairvoyant and, in the world of Scion, she commits treason simply by breathing.

It is raining the day her life changes for ever. Attacked, drugged and kidnapped, Paige is transported to Oxford – a city kept secret for two hundred years, controlled by a powerful, otherworldly race. Paige is assigned to Warden, a Rephaite with mysterious motives. He is her master. Her trainer. Her natural enemy. But if Paige wants to regain her freedom she must allow herself to be nurtured in this prison where she is meant to die.

So far, the novels have been extremely interesting. I even re-read The Bone Season when The Mime Order came out so that I wasn’t completely lost with all the people and the magical orders. Every book has been so riveting and it pulls you in and I can’t wait to start The Song Rising.

If you’ve been reading this series and not sure if you should read it, then check this out:

Following a bloody battle against foes on every side, Paige Mahoney has risen to the dangerous position of Underqueen, ruling over London’s criminal population.

But, having turned her back on Jaxon Hall and with vengeful enemies still at large, the task of stabilizing the fractured underworld has never seemed so challenging.

Little does Paige know that her reign may be cut short by the introduction of Senshield, a deadly technology that spells doom for the clairvoyant community and the world as they know it . . .

The Song Rising and The Bone Season series is published by Bloomsbury and The Song Rising was published on March 7th, 2017.

Book Recommendations, Books

New Reads from Scribner’s

March 17, 2017March 15, 2017by SimoneLeave a Comment

I recently got a package from Scribner’s Books with a couple of great reads publishing right now. Both of these books have already published this March and I’m super excited to get into them. Sadly, I suffer with “too many books in my TBR” syndrome.

However, if you have a chance, definitely pick them up or at least check them out.

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Title: One of the Boys
Author: Daniel Magariel
Publishing Date: March 14th, 2017
Synopsis: A riveting and emotionally harrowing debut about two young brothers and their physically and psychologically abusive father—One of the Boys is 176 perfect, stunning pages by a major new talent.

The three of them—a twelve-year-old boy, his older brother, their father—have won the war: the father’s term for his bitter divorce and custody battle. They leave their Kansas home and drive through the night to Albuquerque, eager to begin again, united by the thrilling possibility of carving out a new life together. The boys go to school, join basketball teams, make friends. Meanwhile their father works from home, smoking cheap cigars to hide another smell. But soon the little missteps—the dead-eyed absentmindedness, the late night noises, the comings and goings of increasingly odd characters—become sinister, and the boys find themselves watching their father change, grow erratic, then violent.

Set in the sublimely stark landscape of suburban New Mexico and a cramped apartment shut tight to the world, One of the Boys conveys with stunning prose and chilling clarity a young boy’s struggle to hold onto the dangerous pieces of his shattered family. Harrowing and beautiful, Daniel Magariel’s masterful debut is a story of survival: two foxhole-weary brothers banding together to protect each other from the father they once trusted, but no longer recognize. With the emotional core of A Little Life and the compact power of We the Animals, One of the Boys is among the most moving and remarkable debut novels you’ll ever read.

Title: Next Year, For Sure
Author: Zoey Leigh Peterson
Publishing Date: March 7th, 2017
Synopsis: In this moving and enormously entertaining debut novel, longtime romantic partners Kathryn and Chris experiment with an open relationship and reconsider everything they thought they knew about love.

After nine years together, Kathryn and Chris have the sort of relationship most would envy. They speak in the shorthand they have invented, complete one another’s sentences, and help each other through every daily and existential dilemma. When Chris tells Kathryn about his feelings for Emily, a vivacious young woman he sees often at the Laundromat, Kathryn encourages her boyfriend to pursue this other woman—certain that her bond with Chris is strong enough to weather a little side dalliance.

As Kathryn and Chris stumble into polyamory, Next Year, For Sure tracks the tumultuous, revelatory, and often very funny year that follows. When Chris’s romance with Emily grows beyond what anyone anticipated, both Chris and Kathryn are invited into Emily’s communal home, where Kathryn will discover new romantic possibilities of her own. In the confusions, passions, and upheavals of their new lives, both Kathryn and Chris will be forced to reconsider their past and what they thought they knew about love.

Offering a luminous portrait of a relationship from two perspectives, Zoey L. Paterson has written an empathic, beautiful, and tremendously honest novel about a great love pushed to the edge. Deeply poignant and hugely entertaining, Next Year, For Sure shows us what lies at the mysterious heart of relationships, and what true openness and transformation require.