Novelas Romanticas Gratis

Well, I devoured a lot of books in January. It was a battle some nights to stay awake long enough to read more than a few pages. I will confess to a few weekends of spending most of my time happily reading instead of doing my weekend chore list. Hey, when the books call, I just have to stop and read.  I tried, I really did, to read The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu . I could not concentrate long enough to get through some of the slower bits. It goes back on my bookshelf with the expectation that I'll pick it up again someday and be able to dive back into it.  February has an extra day--yay! But it always feels so short and I have a lot of books I want to get to this month. I keep looking at my TBR piles and have moments of "Maybe I should just give them all away and make space in my house" to "But I can't because I still want to read all of these!" And then I look on my bookcases and have similar feelings. Then I see the stac...

My last read of January. I finished it at about 2:30 this morning, after falling asleep by 9 PM and then being WIDE awake in the middle of the night. Apparently I'd had enough sleep.  I suspect I'll be on the downslide by about 10 AM this morning. Just in time for my second round of coffee.  This was a quick read, and I wasn't quite sure where it was headed as I was reading about Maeve and her new life in a small town. It felt like the author wasn't quite sure which themes she wanted to focus on and I just figured it would all shake out. After all was said and done, I was happy with where the author was going and satisfied with the whole shebang.  Maeve has just lost her job as a sports journalist (and not a very good one, as she says), and her semi-famous baseball playing boyfriend has just humiliated her with a YouTube video of him smooching on another woman. Broke, she moves back in with her parents, and contemplates her mess of a life. Everything changes whe...

Another novel that was high on my can't wait to read list. I picked it up from the bookstore and was a bit surprised at the length-419 pages. It's a hefty paperback. It wasn't a book that I could zip through, either. It took me a few weeks to dig in and finish it. I'm on the fence about it; I think I'm in the middle of loving it and not loving it.  I think, upon reflection, that I was expecting more of a Fannie Flagg-esque story, and this was not at all a Fannie Flagg flavored story. It starts with the sudden death of Henny Broek. She's happily thinking of Michael, the love of her life. He's back in town, and she just spent the day with him. She absentmindedly steps onto the road and is hit by a truck. Instantly dead. Henny is only 33, and can't believe she's dead.  The story unfolds as Henny hangs around, watching her friends and her family cope with her sudden death. Henny has no idea why she's still around, but decides after a few days that ma...

I can't even begin to describe this novel. It was definitely not what I expected when I picked it up at the library last week. I thought it was about a woman's survival in the wild after a plane crash. Well, that's a big part of it, but there's a lot more, and most of that had me scratching my head.  It's September, 1986 and  seventy-two year old Cloris Waldrip and her husband are flying to a small cabin in the Montana mountains for a weekend getaway. They've traveled from Texas and this is the first vacation they've really had in years.  They never make it to the cabin. The small plane they are in crashes in the Bitterroot Range, a particularly brutal wilderness in Montana. Cloris is the only survivor. What follows is Cloris' struggle to find her way out of the wilderness and to safety. With minimal tools to help her survive, she is sure to die before help arrives. Yet somehow, Cloris finds help in the wilderness, and with her own will to survive...

To say I was a little excited to read this book would be an understatement. I read Nancy Turner's first novel, These is My Words , waaaay back in the late 1990's, and absolutely fell in love with it. To this day, it remains one of my favorite novels.  Most people re-read favorite novels over and over, but I don't. I like to preserve that experience of discovering a story that sticks with me the first time I read it, and I think that if I read it again, it will somehow change for me, and I don't want that. So I will continue to tell people about These is My Words , all based on my first and only read.  However, Nancy Turner kept writing, and wrote Sarah's Quilt and The Star Garden, and My Name is Resolute, which continue the story of Sarah Prine, and then jump back to Sarah's ancestor, Resolute. Light Changes Everything tells the story of Mary Pearl Prine, Sarah's niece.  It's 1907, and Arizona is still a territory of the United States, and still a d...

It's taken me a few weeks to read this novel. I think part of that stems from the writing. It is absolutely beautiful, and you want to linger over it. I haven't read anything like this in a very long time. I read a review that said this was written like a very long poem, and I'd have to say that is what this novel reminded me of--a poem.  Poems are a big part of this tale of Ani, Mac, Roy, Iris, and Frank. Set in 1948 in the small Australian coastal town of Thirroul, Ani and Mac Lachlan and their ten year old daughter Isabel are pretty happy. Mac works for the railway, and Ani takes care of the house. They are deeply in love, and looking forward to celebrating Isabel's upcoming birthday. The war is finally over, and people just want to forget it ever happened.  Things change suddenly for Ani when Mac is killed in a railway accident. It sends her reeling, and into a new life where she has to work and take care of herself and Isabel. Offered a job at the rail...

Wow! This was such a good story. I'm a bit biased, because I have read every one of Simone St. James' novels. She just keeps getting better with each novel.  This latest haunting thriller takes place in Fell, New York. A sleepy little town where the Sun Down Motel sits out on the edge, and a highway runs through to other towns along the way towards New York City. It's the kind of motel that is run down but still offers a place to stay when options are few. It's 1982, and young Vivian Delaney has left her mom's home to seek a new life in New York City. She ends up in Fell, and decides to stay for awhile. She answers an ad for a night clerk at the Sun Down Motel. It's a boring job, but easy work while she figures out what to do with her life.  Except one night, Vivian discovers the motel is haunted. And not in a casual way--in a really big, scare the crap out of you way. Not only do the doors to the rooms open on their own, but lights go out (even the big motel si...

This novel actually arrived in my mail a few weeks ago, thanks to HarperCollins Publishers. It was a welcome surprise, and gave me the chance to read a new author that hit it out of the park with her first novel, If You Knew Her. Her second effort--wow, it really does sit with you for some time after you've finished it.  The plot is fairly simple: Meg and Grace. Mother and daughter. Meg takes care of Grace full-time; Grace is almost eighteen and has lived most of her life as a very ill young girl. She's in a wheelchair, has a feeding tube in her stomach, and suffers from seizures, food issues, headaches... you name it. Meg has spent years taking Grace to doctors and specialists, getting her every bit of care she can find. Both Meg and Grace are beloved by the small town of Ashford, in Cornwall. Folks around there see Meg and Grace as their own, and are fiercely protective of them.  The novel begins with the horrific murder of Meg, in her home, in her bed. G...

I zipped through this novel in a day--my first of 2020. It read very quickly, and I had a hard time putting it down.  Why was it so compelling? I'm not sure. It's a dual storyline, between two women: Nellie in 1956, and Alice in 2018. Both are living in the same home, and married. Nellie is married to a man who swept her off her feet, and she quickly realizes he's not a nice man. Not nice at all. He wants a wife who is pretty, looks perfect all the time, cooks, cleans, and has babies. He's not afraid to use some physical force to keep her in line.  Alice is a modern woman, who recently left her job in New York City under a cloud--although she's kept that bit of information from her husband Nate. He thinks she quit. Nate wants to move out of the city and start a family in a home set in the suburbs. Alice, very reluctantly, agrees. She's a big city lady, and used to working a lot. Nate makes enough money that she can stay home and write her novel. Alice and Nate b...