Tag: book reviews

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Sunrise on the Reaping

I greatly enjoyed all of the earlier Hunger Games books by Suzanne Collins and was eager to read the newest entry, Sunrise on the Reaping. This book provides the backstory for Haymitch Abernathy and the fiftieth annual Hunger Games.

This was a quick read for me, mainly because I kept wanting to find out what the big twist or information unveiling would be.  I never really felt like I got what I was waiting for, however. Collins did a nice job of showing us what Haymitch was like as a teenager, but I didn’t really feel the plot had much to say for itself.  Also, I am not a big poetry fan, so I felt like the amount of poetry at the end was a bit of an overkill.

I’m not upset that I read it, but I thought Ballad was better as prequels go than Sunrise.

Have you read it?  Do you agree or disagree with my opinion?

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What I’m Reading – May 2025

What I’m Reading Now

Fiction – Plymouth Undercover by Pamela M. Kelley – Court Street Investigations #1

Nonfiction – The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis by Karen Swallow Prior

What I Recently Finished

Fiction

  • How to Get a (Love) Life by Rosie Blake
  • Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins – The Hunger Games #0.5
  • The Day Shelley Woodhouse Woke Up by Laura Pearson
  • Young Jane Young by Gabrielle Zevin
  • Lethal Prey by John Sandford – Lucas Davenport #35; Virgil Flowers #16
  • Billy Straight by Jonathan Kellerman – Petra Connor #1
  • Twisted by Jonathan Kellerman – Petra Connor #2

Nonfiction

  • The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended by Sheila Wray Gregoire, Rebecca Gregoire Lindenbach, and Joanna Sawatsky

Short Stories

  • The Bookstore Sisters by Alice Hoffman – The Once Upon a Time Bookshop #1
  • The Bookstore Wedding by Alice Hoffman – The Once Upon a Time Bookshop #2
  • The Bookstore Keepers by Alice Hoffman – The Once Upon a Time Bookshop #3
  • The One That Got Away by Mike Gayle
  • The Sublet by Greer Hendricks
  • The Fall Risk by Abby Jimenez
  • The Tomorrow Box by Curtis Sittenfeld
  • Giraffe & Flamingo by Curtis Sittenfeld
  • Sebastian and the Troll by Fredrik Backman
  • The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin

What I Added to my TBR

Fiction

  • How to Find Your (First) Husband by Rosie Blake
  • The Gin O’Clock Club by Rosie Blake
  • Lessons at the School by the Sea by Jenny Colgan – School by the Sea #3
  • Studies at the School by the Sea by Jenny Colgan – School by the Sea #4
  • Meet Me at the Seaside Cottages by Jenny Colgan
  • The Secret Christmas Library by Jenny Colgan
  • Betting on Good by Wendy Francis
  • Same Time Next Week by Milly Johnson
  • The Unlikely Pursuit of Mary Bennet by Lindz McLeod
  • The Many Futures of Maddy Hart by Laura Pearson
  • I Wanted You to Know by Laura Pearson
  • Missing Pieces by Laura Pearson
  • Nobody’s Wife by Laura Pearson
  • The Beforelife of Eliza Valentine by Laura Pearson
  • The Woman Who Met Herself by Laura Pearson
  • In the Woods by Tana French – Dublin Murder Squad #1
  • Storm Peak by John A. Flanagan – Jesse Parker Mystery #1
  • Avalanche Pass by John A. Flanagan – Jesse Parker Mystery #2

Nonfiction

  • How I Changed My Mind About Evolution: Evangelicals Reflect on Faith and Science by Kathryn Applegate (Editor) and J.B. Stump (Editor)
  • The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say about Human Origins by Peter Enns
  • Autism Out Loud: Life with a Child on the Spectrum, from Diagnosis to Young Adulthood by Kate Swenson, Adrian Wood, and Carrie Cariello

Short Stories

  • The Bookstore Family by Alice Hoffman – The Once Upon a Bookshop #4

TBR Stats/Goal Updates

  • I currently have 160 books on my TBR. Of those, 17 are nonfiction and 143 are fiction.
  • I finished 5 more of my 25 in 2025 list, bringing that total to 18.
  • I have read 46 books so far this year (my goal is 75).
  • One of my goals was to read 2 nonfiction books each month. So far this year I have read 1 per month.

If you’re on Goodreads, feel free to add me as a friend. I’m always looking for new recommendations!

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How to Get a (Love) Life

In How to Get a (Love) Life, Rosie Blake introduces us to Nicola Brown, a somewhat obsessive woman who lives a routine life without much excitement, or love. Her co-worker Caroline dares her to start putting herself out there and try to find love by Valentine’s Day.  Taking the dare, Nicola spends the next three months finding dates by a variety of methods, hoping to find the perfect guy for her.

This was a fun read with a lot of humor and wit. I liked the characters and enjoyed reading about all the disastrous dates Nicola went on in her quest to find love. This is the second book I have read from Blake, and I plan to read more.

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Billy Straight

I have been a fan of Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware series for a long time, and I recently looked through his body of work and found that he has written two books labeled as the Petra Connor series.  They are Billy Straight (1998) and Twisted (2004), and they are a spinoff of the Alex Delaware series.

In Billy Straight, the title character is a twelve year old runaway who witnesses a traumatic murder, a brutal stabbing.  He is not seen and runs away into the night. LAPD homicide detective Petra Connor is tasked with solving this murder.  The story switches between Billy’s reaction to what he has seen and Petra’s unfolding investigation, and as the plot unfolds, we learn more about Billy’s backstory as well.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  I was able to follow everything that was happening even though the perspective is changing in each chapter and could visualize the scenes easily.  I empathized with both Billy and Petra, and I appreciated the range of minor characters as well.

Do you enjoy detective novels?  Are there any that you recommend?

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Shoe Addicts Anonymous

In Shoe Addicts Anonymous by Beth Harbison, we meet four women who come together to swap designer shoes and become friends in the process.  Each of them has their own problems and their Tuesday night group turns out to be a safe place to share their issues and help each other overcome them.

This is a light, humorous read, a textbook example of chick lit. The characters hover on the edge of caricatures and the problems are all tidied up at the end in a way that is entertaining although not totally realistic.

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The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Although I must have heard of The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, I hadn’t read it before now. The coming of age novel came out in 1999, a dozen years after I graduated from high school, which explains why it wasn’t on my radar at the time. It was brought to my attention by a book I read in December of 2024 called The Book Swap.  The two main characters in that book shared a history of loving Perks during their high school years, which intrigued me enough to put it on my TBR.

I really enjoyed this book, although I’m not sure if enjoyed is the right word when it deals with so many heavy issues.  The story is told through a series of letters that Charlie, the main character, is writing to a friend.  We don’t know the identity or location of this friend, but the use of the epistolary style is very effective in allowing us to learn from Charlie’s point of view what is happening and how he feels about it.

I was leaning towards giving this four stars, but then it made me cry.  That is very rare for me and made me realize how invested I had become in Charlie’s story, which bumped it up to five stars. Now that I have read the book, I want to watch the movie, which came out in 2012 and was written and directed by Chbosky.

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My Short Story Weekend

I was looking through my TBR last week and noticed that I had a bunch of short stories on it, most of which were already on my Kindle.  So last weekend, I decided to read them all.

The first three are part of a series called Once Upon a Bookshop by Alice Hoffman. The main characters are two sisters who have been estranged for years but come back together when one of their children reaches out for help.

  • The Bookstore Sisters
  • The Bookstore Wedding
  • The Bookstore Keepers

The rest are standalone stories.

  • The One That Got Away by Mike Gayle – fun story about a guy trying to get over his ex and how he spends the day of her wedding to another guy
  • The Sublet by Greer Hendricks – chilling story about the hidden cost of perfection
  • The Fall Risk by Abby Jimenez – sweet, funny story about two neighbors who get stranded together over Valentine’s Day
  • The Tomorrow Box by Curtis Sittenfeld – part of the Currency collection of Amazon original short stories, an interesting look at two men who were friends in college and meet to catch up many years later
  • Giraffe & Flamingo by Curtis Sittenfeld – an Amazon original short story about a woman reflecting on her college experience 
  • The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin – a classic science fiction story first published in 1954. This was shared with me by a good friend.
  • Sebastian and the Troll by Fredrik Backman – a story about pain that Backman has published on his blog

It was kind of fun to read all of these stories back to back.  They reflect a range of styles and topics, but each one has something to offer. 

Do you enjoy short stories? Or do you prefer to stick to full length books?

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Baby Dinosaurs on the Ark?

Baby Dinosaurs on the Ark? The Bible and Modern Science and the Trouble of Making it All Fit by Janet Kellogg Ray

Summary

Janet Kellogg Ray, a science educator who grew up a creationist, doesn’t want other Christians to have to do the exhausting mental gymnastics she did earlier in her life. Working through the findings of a range of fields including geology, paleontology, and biology, she shows how a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis simply doesn’t mesh with what we know to be reality. But as someone who remains a committed Christian, Ray also shows how an acceptance of the theory of evolution is not necessarily an acceptance of atheism, and how God can still be responsible for having created the world, even if it wasn’t in a single, momentary, miraculous event.

Topics Covered

  • The Nature of Science
  • Young Earth Creationism
  • Old Earth Creationism
  • Intelligent Design
  • Theistic Evolution/Evolutionary Creationism
  • Naturalism and Scientism
  • The Age of the Universe and the Earth
  • The Flood and the Fossil Record
  • The Missing Link
  • Human Evolution
  • Leaving Creationism without Leaving God

My Thoughts

I grew up in a conservative pentecostal church and was taught to believe in a young earth and a literal six day creation period along with a worldwide catastrophic flood.  When I was a teenager in the 1980s, I was exposed to the Institute for Creation Research and became obsessed with their materials.  I even challenged a student teacher in one of my high school science classes once.  I am embarrassed now to remember how superior I felt knowing “the truth” that most scientists didn’t understand.

Over the last several years, I have come to the realization that this belief was rooted in fear.  I was afraid that if I listened to mainstream science, I would lose my faith.  It has taken quite a while to overcome these fears, but I no longer believe in a literal reading of the Bible as it relates to science.

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Ordinary Life: Stories

Ordinary Life: Stories is a collection of fourteen stories, each of which focuses on a woman at a pivotal moment in her life.  Elizabeth Berg has long been a favorite writer of mine, and this book reminded me why I like her so much.

All of the stories show us ordinary women living ordinary lives but with a glimpse of the thoughts and feelings that are usually hidden beneath the surface and sometimes percolate up to the surface.  Berg writes about relationships and the inner lives of women in a way that is so relatable and insightful. 

For example, in the first story, “Ordinary Life,” Mavis McPherson locks herself in the bathroom for a week, shutting out her husband and the realities of their life together.  She isn’t contemplating divorce; she just needs some time to think, take stock of her life, and to arrive, finally, at a surprising conclusion.

Berg’s writing is beautifully descriptive as well. This quote from the story “What Stays” evokes my memories of growing up with two brothers and the way it was often two against one but with constant changing of who was on which side:

“We kids kept one another company, raised ourselves, excused the obvious problems of our mother. We had no outside friends. That didn’t seem to matter too much, though. We made allies and enemies of one another in kaleidoscopic ways. We weren’t bored.”

These stories are so compelling that I found myself wanting to take my time with each one and not rush through just to finish the whole book.

Highly recommended!

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The Kiss Quotient

The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang

Somehow I had read the third book in this series back in 2022, so I decided I should read the first two as well.

These books are sexy romances that feature autistic women at the center of the stories, and I really appreciate the representation of autism in fiction.  It’s important to show that autism presents differently in women than in men and to provide an understanding of the challenges we face. Hoang does a good job of this, especially as she was going through her own journey of being diagnosed with autism at the time.

As for the plot, it was pretty standard fare for a sexy romance.  The main character Stella wants to learn how to enjoy sex and decides to hire a professional to teach her, and that’s how we meet Michael, an escort with his own story to tell. From there, it’s basically a reverse Pretty Woman scenario.

In the end, my take is that it was a fun romance with some good insight into autistic women.