Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Pages: 440
Rating: ★★★★★
Synopsis
In love we find out who we want to be.
In war we find out who we are.
FRANCE, 1939
In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France...but invade they do, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When France is overrun, Vianne is forced to take an enemy into her house, and suddenly her every move is watched; her life and her child’s life is at constant risk. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates around her, she must make one terrible choice after another.
Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old girl, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets the compelling and mysterious Gäetan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only the young can...completely. When he betrays her, Isabelle races headlong into danger and joins the Resistance, never looking back or giving a thought to the real--and deadly--consequences.
With courage, grace and powerful insight, bestselling author Kristin Hannah takes her talented pen to the epic panorama of WWII and illuminates an intimate part of history seldom seen: the women’s war. The Nightingale tells the stories of two sisters, separated by years and experience, by ideals, passion and circumstance, each embarking on her own dangerous path toward survival, love, and freedom in German-occupied, war-torn France--a heartbreakingly beautiful novel that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the durability of women. It is a novel for everyone, a novel for a lifetime.
My Thoughts
Wow, y'all, wow. That is about all I can say about this book. There is a reason this won Goodreads Choice Award for Best Historical Fiction. It was a sweeping journey through occupied France that really captivated me right away. There was a lot of love mentioned in the synopsis which didn't scare me away because I love love stories but this book is not a love story. It is about the women left behind and the love they have for their families and their country.
The main characters are two very different sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, who are trying to get through the war - Vianne by keeping her head down and waiting for her husband to come home and Isabelle by joining the Free French Movement and helping smuggle Allied forces out of occupied France. Both Vianne and Isabelle grow and change during the war, which for me was one of the best parts of the story. Isabelle begins as a naive, rebellious, 18 year old girl who falls in love with Gaetan on the spot. She later grows and becomes wiser. Vianne spends most of the book keeping her daughter safe by bowing to the will of the Nazis in her home and in the town. With time, she gains courage and begins to secretly hide Jewish orphaned children. The characterization was perfect and the growth was really natural.
Even though Isabelle does fall in love with Gaetan, it is not the central plot. When they first met, I kind of felt like "oh, here we go..." but, it's so not like that. Isabelle grows up and their romance is not in the forefront of her mind. There are a lot of layers to this plot and nothing is straightforward or what you think it is.
What I most enjoyed learning about was how the Nazis really took over France and controlled the French people. It started slowly and they gradually took over control through fear and betrayal. This isn't what you typically learn about in school, so it was interesting to see how it all happened and how the French reacted.
There are about 3 chapters in the book that were a flash forward. I kept going back and forth between whose perspective I thought it was from. The ending took me by surprise and left me speechless and crying. I would highly, highly recommend!
My Favorite Line
I know what matters, and it is not what I have lost. It is my memories. Wounds heal. Love lasts. We remain.
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Pages: 473
Rating: ★★★★
Synopsis
In 1875, Sisi, the Empress of Austria is the woman that every man desires and every woman envies.
Beautiful, athletic and intelligent, Sisi has everything - except happiness. Bored with the stultifying etiquette of the Hapsburg Court and her dutiful but unexciting husband, Franz Joseph, Sisi comes to England to hunt. She comes looking for excitement and she finds it in the dashing form of Captain Bay Middleton, the only man in Europe who can outride her. Ten years younger than her and engaged to the rich and devoted Charlotte, Bay has everything to lose by falling for a woman who can never be his. But Bay and the Empress are as reckless as each other, and their mutual attraction is a force that cannot be denied.
My Thoughts
I was initially very unsure about reading this book because the synopsis focuses heavily on Sisi. After reading The Accidental Empress last March, I was hesitant to read The Fortune Hunter in case it changed the view I had of Sisi from the other book. I loved Daisy Goodwin's other novel, An American Heiress, so when Carly of The College Prepster chose The Fortune Hunter for her book club, I decided to go ahead and give it a try.
While the synopsis makes it seem that the central character of this novel is Empress Sisi, I think that it is actually about the heiress, Charlotte Baird. She's quiet, a little plain, and is about to start coming up in society now that her brother is engaged to Lady Augusta Crewe. Charlotte is an avid photographer, a hobby that has been facilitated by her Godmother, and is equally independent and naive.
At the beginning of the novel, Charlotte catches the eye of Captain Bay Middleton. Later in the novel, when all the characters are at the Crewe's home for the hunting season, Bay meets Empress Sisi. From here on, Bay is torn between the two women who are both compelling in their own ways. During this time, Charlotte begins to focus more on herself and photography and eventually leaves the countryside for London to take part in a photography exposition.
This store really showed the role of women during this time period and how trapped they were. Even though Charlotte is an heiress, she can't do anything herself and always has to comply with the ways of society. It took a lot for a woman to break out of the mold that the world created for her. It was exciting to see how the characters in this story pushed against the norms and that is where the best parts of the story come from.
I loved this story and the fact that the characters were real made me like it even more! I would highly recommend to anyone who likes historical fiction.
My Favorite Line
'Well, at least I have managed to put something in your head other than waltzing and cavalry officers. Men are all very well, and a good husband can be enormously useful, but women like us need something to do...'
Hello all!
After the stress of finals and the buzz of the holidays I am finally finding the time to sit down and write this post. I am so proud that I was able to keep up with this blog for the whole year. I accomplished the few goals that I set for myself in 2015 and hope to continue this in 2016.
My initial purpose for starting Hardbacks in Totebags was to keep myself more accountable for my reading. Without the blog I am positive that I would not have read anywhere near the number of books that I have. I initially set my 2015 reading goal on Goodreads for 30 books. I thought that there was no way on Earth I would have the time for 30 books and just hoped that I would get close. Not only did I reach my reading goal but I exceeded it! I ended up reading 37 books this year and I owe it all to this blog. Whether anyone is reading it or not, chronicling my reading experiences held me accountable and it motivated me to reach for another book immediately after finishing one.
This was really my only goal for 2015 and for starting this blog but I am excited to see where 2016 takes me! Since I now have the blog going, my 2016 goals include building readership by becoming more active on social media, redesigning, and I am hoping to start offering recommendations. With these goals I am hoping to engage more with the readers that I have and also gain new followers.
I know the blog has been a little quiet the last few months but I have been reading and all my 2015 books have been reviewed! While on winter break from school I am rereading the Harry Potter series. I am not going to review those, because really how can you? So look for new posts toward the beginning of February when I am back at school and reading something new!
Genre: Mystery
Publisher: Mulholland Books
Pages: 455, 455, 589
Rating: ★★★
Synopsis
After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, and creditors are calling. He has also just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office.
Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man.
You may think you know detectives, but you've never met one quite like Strike. You may think you know about the wealthy and famous, but you've never seen them under an investigation like this. Introducing Cormoran Strike, this is the acclaimed first crime novel by J.K. Rowling, writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.
My Thoughts
After being on my "to be read" list for about a year and a half I finally read this series. And it really took me way too long. It took me a long time to read them and a long time to get around to blogging about them. I'm not sure why it took my so long to read them but I think that for me they seemed to drag a bit. Crime and mystery novels are not typically my go-to so when I picked these up I anticipated the non stop thrill of Gone Girl. But this was not that. And to be honest, I could have read the first one and not finished the rest of the series, but I was blinded by my love of J.K. Rowling from thinking anything but the highest for these books and this forced me to push on.
In The Cuckoo's Calling there was definitely more character introduction and a lesson in how the crime/mystery novel would go. The rest of the books follow the same basic structure of getting a case and piecing it together with your mind being blown at the end of the whole process. The first one was probably my favorite for the same reason that the first in any series is anyone's favorite; the introduction to everything. More detail is paid to the descriptions and it is overall a more fun story with the murder(?)/suicide (?) of the supermodel.
The second, The Silkworm, could have been skipped in my opinion. An author has written a scathing exposé about all the people around him and now he is missing. It follows a similar pattern as the first book but it was kind of gross and to be honest I just really didn't like it, so I am just going to move on...
Career of Evil is the latest book in the series and I loved this one! Coming off of The Silkworm, I really wasn't interested in this one but it seemed to be similar to Cuckoo's Calling so I liked it much better! This one involves Robin getting a severed leg in the mail and Cormoran digging through his past to find out who sent it. There is much more backstory on Cormoran and a larger focus on Robin and Cormoran as a pair. This book ended on a cliffhanger and now I am definitely hooked!
I went through a lot of different emotions towards this series and even now, a month later, I am having a hard time deciding whether I really liked it or not. I will absolutely be picking up the next one whenever it comes out, but as for recommending it, I am no sure that I would. If you like crime/mystery novels then definitely go ahead and grab these, but honestly you would be just as good skipping them!
My Favorite Line
He possessed a finely honed sense for the strange and the wicked. He had seen things all through his childhood that other people preferred to imagine happened only in films.
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 352
Rating: ★★★★
Synopsis
How do you move on after losing the person you loved? How do you build a life worth living?
Louisa Clark is no longer just an ordinary girl living an ordinary life. After the transformative six months spent with Will Traynor, she is struggling without him. When an extraordinary accident forces Lou to return home to her family, she can’t help but feel she’s right back where she started.
Her body heals, but Lou herself knows that she needs to be kick-started back to life. Which is how she ends up in a church basement with the members of the Moving On support group, who share insights, laughter, frustrations, and terrible cookies. They will also lead her to the strong, capable Sam Fielding—the paramedic, whose business is life and death, and the one man who might be able to understand her. Then a figure from Will’s past appears and hijacks all her plans, propelling her into a very different future. . . .
For Lou Clark, life after Will Traynor means learning to fall in love again, with all the risks that brings. But here Jojo Moyes gives us two families, as real as our own, whose joys and sorrows will touch you deeply, and where both changes and surprises await.
After You is quintessential Jojo Moyes—a novel that will make you laugh, cry, and rejoice at being back in the world she creates. Here she does what few novelists can do—revisits beloved characters and takes them to places neither they nor we ever expected.
My Thoughts
After reading and falling in love with Me Before You last month, I was eagerly awaiting the arrival of the sequel. Moyes wasn't planning to initially write a sequel but I am so glad that she did. Even though I felt like I got enough closure in the first book, I was excited to return to the characters I loved and meet some new ones.
After the passing of Will, Louisa is completely lost. She is living in London alone and works at a pub in the airport but she isn't following Will's final piece of advice to "just live well". That is until she falls off her rooftop garden. With this action she begins to reevaluate her life and tries to move forward.
She meets Sam, her paramedic that saved her after she fell. Sam helps bring Louisa out of her depression and to see how her life could change if she can just move past the death of Will. Along with Sam, Louisa also meets the 16 year old Lily who has her own connections to Will. They all work together to come out of their own grief and become people that Will would be proud of.
I am so happy with the way the sequel worked out. I was afraid it would leave me disappointed but Moyes did a good job to ensure that this book stands alone but also functions as part of the whole. I enjoyed revisiting these characters and seeing the way Louisa was able to change and leap out from her comfort zone with the help of new people in her life. If you liked Me Before You, definitely continue on to After You.
My Favorite Line
You Live. And you throw yourself into everything and try not to think about the bruises.
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Anchor Books
Pages: 527
Rating: ★★★
Synopsis
When New Yorker Rachel Chu agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend, Nicholas Young, she envisions a humble family home and quality time with the man she hopes to marry. But Nick has failed to give his girlfriend a few key details. One, that his childhood home looks like a palace; two, that he grew up riding in more private planes than cars; and three, that he just happens to be the country’s most eligible bachelor.
On Nick’s arm, Rachel may as well have a target on her back the second she steps off the plane, and soon, her relaxed vacation turns into an obstacle course of old money, new money, nosy relatives, and scheming social climbers.
My Thoughts
I do not get the love/cult following for this book and for it's sequel China Rich Girlfriend. I don't know if I am missing something here or if it's just that I wasn't really into it. It was very slow to start, the middle was good but definitely not great, and then the last 100 pages were really good and made me question my feelings toward the other 400 pages.
The book begins with an introduction to the insane wealth of the main characters. When the Young family is mistreated at a ritzy hotel in London, they just end up buying the hotel and firing the rude manager. The title does not lie -- it really is about some crazy rich asians.
The book then introduces us to the main characters Nick and Rachel. Kwan shifts point of view between the modest lives of Nick and Rachel in New York and Nick's mother Eleanor in her posh Singapore apartment. As I already said, this beginning was slow to start. It was all about establishing the different lifestyles between Rachel and Nick's Singaporean relatives. Eventually, Nick and Rachel finally come to Singapore where they meet all of Nick's friends and family. Rachel begins to experience the insane wealth and the shallow people that all make up Nick's past. Rachel must decide whether the life Nick has in Singapore is something she can learn to accept.
Overall, this book was probably too long for the subject matter. I skipped through several chapters told from secondary characters point of views because I didn't care about their story lines. There was constant name dropping in an attempt to really force the topic of wealth. I wasn't very into this book and definitely won't be returning for the sequel.
My Favorite Line
The investigator thinks that they were most likely working class. In other words, they are PEASANTS.
Genre: Nonfiction
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Pages: 240
Rating: ★★★★★
Synopsis
In Why Not Me?, Kaling shares her ongoing journey to find contentment and excitement in her adult life, whether it’s falling in love at work, seeking new friendships in lonely places, attempting to be the first person in history to lose weight without any behavior modification whatsoever, or most important, believing that you have a place in Hollywood when you’re constantly reminded that no one looks like you.
In “How to Look Spectacular: A Starlet’s Confessions,” Kaling gives her tongue-in-cheek secrets for surefire on-camera beauty, (“Your natural hair color may be appropriate for your skin tone, but this isn’t the land of appropriate–this is Hollywood, baby. Out here, a dark-skinned woman’s traditional hair color is honey blonde.”) “Player” tells the story of Kaling being seduced and dumped by a female friend in L.A. (“I had been replaced by a younger model. And now they had matching bangs.”) In “Unlikely Leading Lady,” she muses on America’s fixation with the weight of actresses, (“Most women we see onscreen are either so thin that they’re walking clavicles or so huge that their only scenes involve them breaking furniture.”) And in “Soup Snakes,” Kaling spills some secrets on her relationship with her ex-boyfriend and close friend, B.J. Novak (“I will freely admit: my relationship with B.J. Novak is weird as hell.”)
Mindy turns the anxieties, the glamour, and the celebrations of her second coming-of-age into a laugh-out-loud funny collection of essays that anyone who’s ever been at a turning point in their life or career can relate to. And those who’ve never been at a turning point can skip to the parts where she talks about meeting Bradley Cooper.
My Thoughts
I love Mindy Kaling. I love her TV show. I love her books. I love her. If there is one thing you learn about me it is this, I. Love. Mindy. Kaling. She could have written 240 pages on mathematical equations and I probably would have read it and loved it because to me, whatever Mindy says goes.
Why Not Me starts off with the section For the Ladies which, of course, is hysterical. Kaling covers everything from her Hollywood beauty secrets to the things she would want you to bring to her dinner party. In the essay titled Some Thoughts on Weddings, Kaling describes how her friendships have changed since college by saying that her friends "will never come home to each other again and will never have each other's undivided attention. That version of our friendship is over". With graduation in the Spring, this quote hit a little close to home. But its not all sentimental, when describing her time in a sorority Kaling describes her horror at being fined for not attending an event. Which is hilarious if you know that this is absolutely common. Per usual, everything is absolutely relevant and completely clever.
The next section of essays covers Kaling's television series The Mindy Project. In the essay A Day in the Life of Mindy Kaling, Mindy's assistant Sonia documents and timelines an entire day for Mindy Kaling. Truth bombs from this essay include "Prop cake is the sweetest kind of cake because unlike with regular cake, it has no calories because my character is eating it, not me. Thats how it works". Kaling reflects on when she found out that The Mindy Project wasn't nominated for an Emmy and how she chose to "be gracious so people would continue to think I'm professional and classy". As if you needed another reason to idolize her!
Love Dating and Boys Who Ru(i)n The World had me constantly underlining statements and simply annotating them with a simple 'yes.' Everything here was exactly straight out of my brain. Being perpetually single has its ups and downs and Kaling 100% gets it. "What I am asking for is not that much. I just want a boyfriend who is sweet and trustworthy. That's it". That is how the essay A Perfectly Reasonable Request begins. Of course Mindy doesn't stop there. You'll have to read the whole essay to see what other requests Kaling has, but its hilarious.
In the last section of Kaling's book I was faced with the impending tragedy of the book actually ending. All the Opinions You Will Ever Need is really that. In what was probably the most relatable essay in the book, Kaling discusses what it is like to be a body role model but also her struggles with remaining body confident. My favorite essay of the whole book is in this section and titled Unlikely Leading Lady. Kaling admits "I don't wake up in the morning, look my naked body in the mirror and say, 'Good Morning, body. Once again you've nailed it, you gorgeous imperfect thing." This essay really captured Kaling's thoughts of herself and also allowed me to relate to her. Mindy also included a copy of her Harvard Law School Commencement Address which is so funny and so great. (Confession: I love watching commencement addresses and Kaling's is up in my tops!)
Overall, this book was a fabulous description of Mindy and it just made me love her more! Definitely read her first book if you haven't already and then grab this one too!
My Favorite Line
If you've got it flaunt it. And if you've don't got it? Flaunt it. 'Cause what are we even doing here if we're not flaunting it?
