Review: Fitness Junkie by Lucy Sykes and Jo Piazza

Rate:

4/5

Goodreads Description:

When Janey Sweet, CEO of a couture wedding dress company, is photographed in the front row of a fashion show eating a bruffin--the delicious lovechild of a brioche and a muffin--her best friend and business partner, Beau, gives her an ultimatum: Lose thirty pounds or lose your job. Sure, Janey has gained some weight since her divorce, and no, her beautifully cut trousers don't fit like they used to, so Janey throws herself headlong into the world of the fitness revolution, signing up for a shockingly expensive workout pass, baring it all for Free the Nipple yoga, sweating through boot camp classes run by Sri Lankan militants and spinning to the screams of a Lycra-clad instructor with rage issues. At a juice shop she meets Jacob, a cute young guy who takes her dumpster-diving outside Whole Foods on their first date. At a shaman's tea ceremony she meets Hugh, a silver fox who holds her hand through an ayahuasca hallucination And at a secret exercise studio Janey meets Sara Strong, the wildly popular workout guru whose special dance routine has starlets and wealthy women flocking to her for results that seem too good to be true. As Janey eschews delicious carbs, pays thousands of dollars to charlatans, and is harassed by her very own fitness bracelet, she can't help but wonder: Did she really need to lose weight in the first place? 

A hilarious send-up of the health and wellness industry, Fitness Junkie is a glorious romp through the absurd landscape of our weight-obsessed culture.

Review: 

I really found myself enjoying this book from the first set of pages and also found myself disliking Beau.

Like he was the typical douch that let any sort of recognition get to his head and forget how he got there. The people that were there for him. Janey more than anyone. From Janey we see just how superficial society has gotten but also that hey, not everyone is bad, sure they want to fit in with the latest trends but for some, their heart is in the right place. As well as, hey, its okay to be happy just were you are at and to enjoy yourself once in a while. 

Now the weird personally thing was that I found myself wanting to eat the junkiest of junk while reading this and even as I write the review I am eating a muffin. Not a bruffin, but a dark double chocolate muffin xD I guess its because I kept reading about workouts and its like.. This counts as a work out right? I can treat myself now!

So you could say that im glad that I am done with the book.

I loved it, to be honest, its the perfect summer read.

Recommend it?

Yup I do!

Review: Dear Mr. M by Herman Koch

Rate:

3/5

Goodreads Description:

The tour-de-force, hair-raising new novel from Herman Koch, New York Times bestselling author of The Dinner and Summer House with Swimming Pool

Once a celebrated writer, M's greatest success came with a suspense novel based on a real-life disappearance. The book was called The Reckoning, and it told the story of Jan Landzaat, a history teacher who went missing one winter after his brief affair with Laura, his stunning pupil. Jan was last seen at the holiday cottage where Laura was staying with her new boyfriend. Upon publication, M.'s novel was a bestseller, one that marked his international breakthrough.

That was years ago, and now M.'s career is almost over as he fades increasingly into obscurity. But not when it comes to his bizarre, seemingly timid neighbor who keeps a close eye on him. Why? 

From various perspectives, Herman Koch tells the dark tale of a writer in decline, a teenage couple in love, a missing teacher, and a single book that entwines all of their fates. Thanks to The Reckoning, supposedly a work of fiction, everyone seems to be linked forever, until something unexpected spins the "story" off its rails. 

With racing tension, sardonic wit, and a world-renowned sharp eye for human failings, Herman Koch once again spares nothing and no one in his gripping new novel, a barbed tour de force suspending readers in the mysterious literary gray space between fact and fiction, promising to keep them awake at night, and justly paranoid in the merciless morning.

Review:

This book builds on the suspense from the very first set of pages.

It also starts to build on the plot in a way that for me, started to get a bit hard to keep up with what was going on.

Another thing that irked me was that sure, the suspense was building and I was like holy shit imma burst out of my seems but then it kinda start just bobbing along in a flatline until the end again and it irked me because I was like what if this is one of those stories that have a strong beginning and then suck!

Mean, I know.

But it DOES pick up as the climax reaches but even then, its not as entertaining as the beginning portion of the book. 

Review: The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Rate:

5/5

Goodreads Description:

Henrietta Lacks, as HeLa, is known to present-day scientists for her cells from cervical cancer. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells were taken without her knowledge and still live decades after her death. Cells descended from her may weigh more than 50M metric tons. 

HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks was buried in an unmarked grave.

The journey starts in the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s, her small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia — wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo. Today are stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells, East Baltimore children and grandchildren live in obscurity, see no profits, and feel violated. The dark history of experimentation on African Americans helped lead to the birth of bioethics, and legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

Review:

Jesus this was such a wonderful book! There are a few set of books that I can consider worth it and this is one of them for sure. It was so interesting, informative and just something that deserves to be shared not just for information but for the recognition that the family of Henrietta and Henrietta herself deserve, particularly after how they were played. What are the chances in life that something like this is discovered, the effect that someone, that their insides, can have on the future! Not just a single person, a single family, but generations to come! How sad and weirdly ironic that she herself held what scientist needed to have been able to help save her.

This book covers a wide set of topics, ethics, science, racism, legality, technicalities and well... lots of ism and ities. 

Recommend it?

Freaking yes, this should be assigned reading. 

Review: All the missing girls by Megan Miranda

Rate:

5/5

Goodreads Description:

Like the spellbinding psychological suspense in The Girl on the Train and Luckiest Girl Alive, Megan Miranda’s novel is a nail-biting, breathtaking story about the disappearances of two young women—a decade apart—told in reverse.

It’s been ten years since Nicolette Farrell left her rural hometown after her best friend, Corinne, disappeared from Cooley Ridge without a trace. Back again to tie up loose ends and care for her ailing father, Nic is soon plunged into a shocking drama that reawakens Corinne’s case and breaks open old wounds long since stitched.

The decade-old investigation focused on Nic, her brother Daniel, boyfriend Tyler, and Corinne’s boyfriend Jackson. Since then, only Nic has left Cooley Ridge. Daniel and his wife, Laura, are expecting a baby; Jackson works at the town bar; and Tyler is dating Annaleise Carter, Nic’s younger neighbor and the group’s alibi the night Corinne disappeared. Then, within days of Nic’s return, Annaleise goes missing.

Told backwards—Day 15 to Day 1—from the time Annaleise goes missing, Nic works to unravel the truth about her younger neighbor’s disappearance, revealing shocking truths about her friends, her family, and what really happened to Corinne that night ten years ago.

Like nothing you’ve ever read before, All the Missing Girls delivers in all the right ways. With twists and turns that lead down dark alleys and dead ends, you may think you’re walking a familiar path, but then Megan Miranda turns it all upside down and inside out and leaves us wondering just how far we would be willing to go to protect those we love.

Review:

This was such a good book, I can't believe I did not read it sooner. It took me a while to understand how the book was being doing, from later dates until the date of the disappearance, and I sure as heck wasn't expecting a bunch of the things that were happening. It's sad for me but so great at the same time. It made for an exciting book. This is a book I will shove in everyone's face and tell them to read it about 50 times. 

I love the way that Miranda developed her characters, it was just so good!

I cant, I sound like a broken record with this book I know. The book isn't lying when its somewhat compared to The Girl on the Train, its that addicting... Unless you didn't like that book, then you probably would like it either. The book itself reveals why the story is done in reverse but like the girl on the train you have your suspicions as to what happened to the missing girls, but you are never truly right and in the end, the most unexpected person did it. 

Recommend it?

Freaking yes, it has been a few days since I finished the book and as you can probably tell, I am still not able to put coherent thoughts together. 

Review: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Rate:

3.5/5

Goodreads Description:

Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.

A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.

Review:

The book reminded me a bit of Coraline in the aspect of creepiness surrounding kids. Not kid s themselves but things happening to them.

The things happening him as child were just so harsh but that is just the reality of things at times, and THAT is what pissed me off, that some parents would actually do things like that. The story could be a bit hard to follow at times and I don't know if this was because as a young kid he couldn't understand them himself or if this had to do with the writing in the book itself. This was my first Neil Gaiman book so I have nothing to compare it to yet, there is a long waiting list for his books so I will have to get back to you all on that. 

After a while I had actually forgot that there was a present and that there was a funeral which added to my confusion. 

The book was creepy in the part that this is a fear targeted more towards adults, things that if kids read it they wouldnt be as creeped out by it as we would be. Like Coraline, which by the way is also written by Gaiman, its has the aspect of your family not being your family, and as soon as you don't accept that, shit will go wrong.

Recommend it?

Yeah, it was enjoyable, a tad creepy and even though I was a tad confused at like 3 parts of the book, I still really dug it

Review: Beautiful Creatures by Margaret Stohl and Kami Garcia

Rate:

5/5

Goodreads Description:

Lena Duchannes is unlike anyone the small Southern town of Gatlin has ever seen, and she's struggling to conceal her power, and a curse that has haunted her family for generations. But even within the overgrown gardens, murky swamps and crumbling graveyards of the forgotten South, a secret cannot stay hidden forever.

Ethan Wate, who has been counting the months until he can escape from Gatlin, is haunted by dreams of a beautiful girl he has never met. When Lena moves into the town's oldest and most infamous plantation, Ethan is inexplicably drawn to her and determined to uncover the connection between them.

In a town with no surprises, one secret could change everything.

Review:

So when the movie came out, I was all about reading the book first, to know what to expect. Which now a days if you have come across both you know that they are different.

Back then, the book was interesting enough to me but still not worth it enough to finish it. It was totally one of the first books that I bought for myself besides Twilight. And even then, my mom bought me Twilight after I asked for it. 

I have ALWAYS wanted to read this series but have never given myself the time to sit and actually get to it and even now, I went the audiobook route. I loved the audiobook, the extra effects that they add personally made the book a lot better when it came to feeling the things that Ethan felt, and saw and made it easier to understand, particularly when it came to the flashbacks and dreams, since the tone was different, it added the creepiness that it really should be. 

It made the experience really enjoyable.

Something I have always wondered is HOW in the world are teens in books and movies able to not just sneak in and out but sneak other people into their rooms and not get caught. Like HOW the living heck!

But thats not relevant

But seriously, someone tell me. 

Anyways, i devoured the book this time around, I thought that the book was simply enjoyable but no, I found myself going through 80% of the book in a single day and wouldve continued onwards if I wasnt so upset while studying for my calc test.

I would go ahead and rant on calc cuz it destroyed my life but what is the point. 

I can see why people love this series so much, I grew to care so much for the characters, for all of them really and I can't even place what it was about it that just drew me so much. 

I am such a fan now, if I didn't have a life changing test coming up.

The story was entertaining and so was the ending, the ending left with with a sense of satisfaction but knowing that there is more, I am more than eager to devour the world and know all about everyone in it. 

Recommend it?

Yes. I do, I really do.