Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Doubleday
Pages: 352
Rating: ★★★
Synopsis
An outrageously stylish, wickedly funny novel of fashion in the digital age, The Knockoff is the story of Imogen Tate, editor in chief of Glossy magazine, who finds her twentysomething former assistant Eve Morton plotting to knock Imogen off her pedestal, take over her job, and reduce the magazine, famous for its lavish 768-page September issue, into an app.
When Imogen returns to work at Glossy after six months away, she can barely recognize her own magazine. Eve, fresh out of Harvard Business School, has fired “the gray hairs,” put the managing editor in a supply closet, stopped using the landlines, and hired a bevy of manicured and questionably attired underlings who text and tweet their way through meetings. Imogen, darling of the fashion world, may have Alexander Wang and Diane von Furstenberg on speed dial, but she can’t tell Facebook from Foursquare and once got her iPhone stuck in Japanese for two days. Under Eve’s reign, Glossy is rapidly becoming a digital sweatshop—hackathons rage all night, girls who sleep get fired, and “fun” means mandatory, company-wide coordinated dances to Beyoncé. Wildly out of her depth, Imogen faces a choice—pack up her Smythson notebooks and quit, or channel her inner geek and take on Eve to save both the magazine and her career. A glittering, uproarious, sharply drawn story filled with thinly veiled fashion personalities, The Knockoff is an insider’s look at the ever-changing world of fashion and a fabulous romp for our Internet-addicted age.
My Thoughts
So this book started off a little bit slow and took me a while to get into it, but once I did I thoroughly enjoyed it!
The authors take the time in the beginning of the book to really emphasize the lack of technology that Imogen is accustomed to which became a little over the top and a little unbelievable. Imogen is only in her early forty's and I found it very hard to believe that she couldn't even check her email. Regardless, this ensured the tech gap to between Eve and Imogen to be large enough for the story to work.
What I really was interested in was the dynamic between the Millennial workers and the Generation X's. It was easy to relate to the younger characters in the book and also feel so disgusted at the behavior that my generation is known for.
Take Devil Wears Prada and add a tech spin to it and you would pretty easily have The Knockoff.
My Favorite Line
Imogen sometimes wondered if people weren't letting social media dictate their entire lives. Did they choose to go to one party over another because it would look better on Instagram?
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Pages: 454
Rating: ★★★★
Synopsis
American Rebecca Porter was never one for fairy tales. Her twin sister, Lacey, has always been the romantic who fantasized about glamour and royalty, fame and fortune. Yet it's Bex who seeks adventure at Oxford and finds herself living down the hall from Prince Nicholas, Great Britain's future king. And when Bex can't resist falling for Nick, the person behind the prince, it propels her into a world she did not expect to inhabit, under a spotlight she is not prepared to face.
Dating Nick immerses Bex in ritzy society, dazzling ski trips, and dinners at Kensington Palace with him and his charming, troublesome brother, Freddie. But the relationship also comes with unimaginable baggage: hysterical tabloids, Nick's sparkling and far more suitable ex-girlfriends, and a royal family whose private life is much thornier and more tragic than anyone on the outside knows. The pressures are almost too much to bear, as Bex struggles to reconcile the man she loves with the monarch he's fated to become.
Which is how she gets into trouble.
Now, on the eve of the wedding of the century, Bex is faced with whether everything she's sacrificed for love-her career, her home, her family, maybe even herself-will have been for nothing.
My Thoughts
I have tried to read this book so many times. The minute I heard about it I knew that I had to read it so the day that it went on sale I went to Square Books in my small college town of Oxford, Mississippi only to find out that they did not have it. So I decided to wait until after finals to read it. But for some reason I chose to read the awful Vacationers instead. Then I went on to finish Outlander and when I could finally fit it in, none of the Barnes & Noble's near me had it. So when I was finally able to lay hands on the hard cover of this book I was so excited to dive in.
This book is best described as Kate Middleton fan-fiction -- hence why I absolutely had to read it. All the characters are easy to compare to the real life members of the Kate and Will story. It was easy to take what I was reading and apply it to their story, but at the same time the characters were also able to stand alone in their own way. Not only was I in love with Nick and Bex, I was genuinely interested in the secondary characters as well. Cocks and Morgan were careful to be sure that they were just as developed and interesting as the main characters. I fell in love with all them so easily which really made it hard to put down when it was all over.
The story is told from Bex's perspective and starts the night before the big royal wedding. This teases some big scandal that you eventually get to towards the end of the book. We then rewind back to Bex's first day at Oxford and from that point her story continues chronologically.
This book is everything that I wanted. A funny love story with well-rounded characters, a little bit of wish-fulfillment but also emotional journeys that feel real. Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan really did a great job at creating a look at what the royal family looks like from the inside -- and it's not as glamorous as we might think.
My Favorite Line
I hung up the phone and tapped it lightly against my chin, then wrapped myself tighter in my giant woolen cardigan and poured another glass of boxed wine — the official drink of emotionally confused women on a budget.
Genre: Memior
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 265
Rating: ★★★★
Synopsis
From the acclaimed creator, producer, and star of HBO's Girls comes a hilarious, wise, and fiercely candid collection of personal essays that establishes Lena Dunham as one of the most original young talents writing today.
In Not that Kind of Girl, Dunham illuminates the experiences that are part of making one's way in the world: falling in love, feeling alone, being ten pounds overweight despite eating only health food, having to prove yourself in a room full of men twice your age, finding true love, and, most of all, having the guts to believe that your story is one that deserves to be told.
Exuberant, moving, and keenly observed, Not that Kind of Girl is a series of dispatches from the frontlines of the struggle that is growing up. "I'm already predicting my future shame at thinking I had anything to offer you," Dunham writes. "But if I can take what I've learned and make one menial job easier for you, or prevent you from having the kind of sex where you feel you must keep your sneakers on in case you want to run away during the act, then every misstep of mine will have been worthwhile."
My Thoughts
In my perfect world I am best friends with Lena Dunham and Mindy Kaling. We grab coffee together and they make me laugh and the three of us are changing the world and the way people look at women. But, I do not live in that world. So I am forced to read their books and watch their shows and basically worship the ground they walk on.
I started reading this book in the Fall when it first came out and somewhere along the way got busy and forgot to finish it. Well, I rectified that situation today and finally read the last fifty pages. Now I am trying to remember why I ever stopped.
Dunham is open and honest but at the same time sarcastic and hilarious. Her collection of essays give you a peek into her mind and I really felt that I was getting a genuine representation of Lena as a person. She has put so much of herself into this book and I love the way she makes you listen to her. Lena does not shy away from anything and its refreshing to have real role models with confidence and self-awareness who also have something to say.
Sidenote: this book is so cute. I'm not talking the stories, I am talking about the actual, physical book. There are precious doodles at the paragraph breaks and sketches in the margins. If there's one thing I love more than a good book, it's a pretty book.
My Favorite Line
The end never comes when you think it will. It's always ten steps past the worst moment, then a weird turn to the left.
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 260
Rating: ★★★★★
Synopsis
There are secrets you share, and secrets you hide…
Growing up on her family’s Sonoma vineyard, Georgia Ford learned some important secrets. The secret number of grapes it takes to make a bottle of wine: eight hundred. The secret ingredient in her mother’s lasagna: chocolate. The secret behind ending a fight: hold hands.
But just a week before her wedding, thirty-year-old Georgia discovers her beloved fiancé has been keeping a secret so explosive, it will change their lives forever.
Georgia does what she’s always done: she returns to the family vineyard, expecting the comfort of her long-married parents, and her brothers, and everything familiar. But it turns out her fiancé is not the only one who’s been keeping secrets…
My Thoughts
If books were free and I had unlimited time, I would have read this book in one sitting. But, this book cost $25 and I had to make it last the week. This caused me to physically force myself to stop reading it. This book was that good.
I didn't have a whole lot of expectations for this book. It's not that I thought it wouldn't be good but I definitely wasn't expecting it to be great. I was looking for something light-hearted and easy-breasy for my first post-Outlander read. This book was everything I wanted and more.
Eight Hundred Grapes really goes into how life changes in the most unexpected ways and how it will eventually lead you right back to where you belong. Laura Dave does a really great job at pulling you in to the characters and the setting. It was so easy to fall in love with the plot all because of the wonderful writing.
Bottom line...grab a bottle of Pinot Noir and settle in for this sweet story.
My Favorite Line
Synchronization. Everything lines up like a sign of where you are supposed to be. But what do you give up? Because you give something up. As simple - and complicated - as the other line, the other way your life could have been if you had taken a different path. If you had gotten into the right car. If you hadn't gotten out of the wrong one.
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: Dell
Pages: 896, 743, 870, 1070, 1443, 980, 848, 814
Rating: ★★★★★
Synopsis
The year is 1945. Claire Randall, a former combat nurse, is just back from the war and reunited with her husband on a second honeymoon when she walks through a standing stone in one of the ancient circles that dot the British Isles. Suddenly she is a Sassenach—an “outlander”—in a Scotland torn by war and raiding border clans in the year of Our Lord...1743.
Hurled back in time by forces she cannot understand, Claire is catapulted into the intrigues of lairds and spies that may threaten her life, and shatter her heart. For here James Fraser, a gallant young Scots warrior, shows her a love so absolute that Claire becomes a woman torn between fidelity and desire—and between two vastly different men in two irreconcilable lives.
My Thoughts
I'm back! I have spent the last month or so finally finishing the last half of the Outlander series. Ever since I started reading these over Christmas break I haven't been able to stop. They do take a lot of concentration to read them so I wasn't able to work through them during the school year, but once summer began I dove right back into them.
These books are an absolute must read for any historical fiction fan. The synopsis above is just from the first book (which in my opinion was the best book) but really sets up the story to continue on for next seven books.
It is so hard to have a series go on and on for so long but with each book Gabaldon has found a way to keep the story changing in new, exciting ways that only captivate her readers more. With the introductions of new storylines, relationships were constantly changing keeping the stories fresh. Of course, at times these plot lines came to be a little ridiculous, but the heart of the books stayed the same.
Fair warning, these books are highly addictive and I couldn't get within 200 pages of the end before running to the store to be sure that I had the next book ready to go. Finishing Written in My Own Heart's Blood and not having the next book right away has definitely been difficult. I am just counting down the years until book number nine comes out!
If you are looking for a great read to really get into, then the Outlander books are definitely for you!
For reference, I have ranked them in preferential order below.
Outlander
Dragonfly in Amber
Voyager
An Echo in the Bone
Written In My Own Heart's Blood
Drums of Autumn
A Breath of Snow and Ashes
The Fiery Cross
My Favorite Line
'When the day shall come, that we do part,' he said softly, and turned to look at me, 'if my last words are not 'I love you'—ye'll ken it was because I didna have time.'
