I enjoy reading ARCs. The uncorrected versions are more appealing to me! EVEN more appealing is getting them before they book drops, it’s like knowing a secret and having to keep it for months and then you can talk about it!
The following ARCs are headed to a Little Free Library for others to love. Here are my thoughts on them.
Lola: A Novel by Melissa Scrivner Love
The Crenshaw Six are a small but up-and-coming gang in South Central LA who have recently been drawn into an escalating war between rival drug cartels. To outsiders, the Crenshaw Six appear to be led by a man named Garcia . . . but what no one has figured out is that the gang’s real leader (and secret weapon) is Garcia’s girlfriend, a brilliant young woman named Lola. Lola has mastered playing the role of submissive girlfriend, and in the man’s world she inhabits she is consistently underestimated. But in truth she is much, much smarter–and in many ways tougher and more ruthless–than any of the men around her, and as the gang is increasingly sucked into a world of high-stakes betrayal and brutal violence, her skills and leadership become their only hope of survival.
This girl is something! The book was a little more brutal and tense than I was planning on. It’s very much true to life. These stories, although fiction, are many people’s reality. I’m glad I read it.
A teenage girl asked me to read this book with her when she found out that I had an ARC. She had the new book, she had just purchased. The story of Lola made for some really good discussions. It’s easier for some teens to open up and relate to a happening to a character in the book and saying “Hey, that happened to me” than to just start talking about an issue.
For Son’s of Anarchy fans and that type of genre, this is definitely the book for you. The strong female lead is to be commended.
Chain of Title
In the depths of the Great Recession, a cancer nurse, a car dealership worker, and an insurance fraud specialist helped uncover the largest consumer crime in American history—a scandal that implicated dozens of major executives on Wall Street. They called it foreclosure fraud: millions of families were kicked out of their homes based on false evidence by mortgage companies that had no legal right to foreclose.
Lisa Epstein, Michael Redman, and Lynn Szymoniak did not work in government or law enforcement. They had no history of anticorporate activism. Instead they were all foreclosure victims, and while struggling with their shame and isolation they committed a revolutionary act: closely reading their mortgage documents, discovering the deceit behind them, and building a movement to expose it.
Fiscal Times columnist David Dayen recounts how these ordinary Floridians challenged the most powerful institutions in America armed only with the truth—and for a brief moment they brought the corrupt financial industry to its knees.
WOW. That is what I thought reading this. What amazing activism and fight for what’s right. These people are to be applauded. What a heart wrenching amazing battle they fought exposing this terrible crisis. The lack of people seeing what was going on, all the massive corruption, greed that occurred all described in this book it’s sickening and appalling. Watching the news of late and the rolling back of these protections should scare us all.
The Translation of Love
Against the backdrop of occupied Tokyo, a young girl searches for her missing older sister, who has disappeared into the world of bars and dance halls. In the process, her story will become intertwined with those of others trying to make sense of their lives in a post-war world: a thirteen-year-old Japanese Canadian “repat,” a school teacher who translates love letters from American GIs, and a Japanese-American soldier serving with the Occupation forces. An emotionally gripping portrait of a battered nation, The Translation of Love mines this turbulent period to show how war irrevocably shapes the lives of people on both sides—and how resilience, friendship, and love translate across cultures and borders no matter the circumstances.
This is heartbreaking emotional. The hope kept alive, love, friendship and the journey of post-war is told so beautifully. The book sucks you in and you feel like you’re there. This book was just released in paperback, I highly recommend picking it up to read. Also the cover is stunning accurately so, since the book is as well.
Family secrets. Forbidden love. And the true price of wealth.
The story begins with a dinner party invitation… When young journalist Thomas Cleary is sent to dig up quotes for the obituary of a legendary film producer, the man’s eccentric daughter offers him access to the exclusive upper echelons of Hollywood society. As Thomas enters a world of private jets and sprawling mansions, his life and career take off beyond his wildest dreams.
Then he meets Matilda Duplaine.
Beautiful and mysterious, Matilda has spent her entire life within the walls of her powerful father’s Bel-Air estate. Thomas is entranced, and the two begin a secret love affair. But the more he learns about the mysterious woman’s identity, the more he realizes that privilege always comes with a price.
Need something to read on the beach?? Pick this. It is definitely a fairy tale love story. All that glitters in not necessarily gold comes to mind when reading this. Power, money and possessions do not make one happy or loved. Good fluff read, told well.
“Forty rooms” is a conceit: it proposes that a modern woman will inhabit forty rooms in her lifetime. They form her biography, from childhood to death. For our protagonist, the much-loved child of a late marriage, the first rooms she is aware of as she nears the age of five are those that make up her family’s Moscow apartment. We follow this child as she reaches adolescence, leaves home to study in America, and slowly discovers sexual happiness and love. But her hunger for adventure and her longing to be a great poet conspire to kill the affair. She seems to have made her choice. But one day she runs into a college classmate. He is sure of his path through life, and he is protective of her. (He is also a great cook.) They drift into an affair and marriage. What follows are the decades of births and deaths, the celebrations, material accumulations, and home comforts—until one day, her children grown and gone, her husband absent, she finds herself alone except for the ghosts of her youth, who have come back to haunt and even taunt her.
This book is written so well it takes your breath away. The wording, the phrases, paragraphs it just takes your breath away. The first part of the book read better than the last but I believe that was intentional to the plot. Having regret live within your very soul day in and day out chipping away at you is something I fight as well and maybe why I loved this book so much. You follow the main character her whole life and the decisions she makes are decisions a lot of women make. How much of self one sacrifices is explored immensely. The yearning for life and the questions…..is this really it, had I decided differently and been more true to self then what. Fantastic read. I am personally going to purchase this so that in a while I can read it again.
A Harvest of Thrones
A beloved American corporation with an explosive secret.
A disgraced former journalist looking for redemption.
A corporate executive with nothing left to lose.
I enjoyed the format of this book. It is a fairy quick read. The greed of the fashion industry should be shocking to none. The practices are reprehensible to this day. Greed is just plain evil. Good fictional portrait of an actual real life happenings all over the world.
On to reading more ARCs.
Peace.
