McBusted: The Story of the World's Biggest Super Band
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This is the first book to tell the full inside story of the world's most awesome supergroup,...
Taboo - Season 1
TV Season Watch
Set in 1814, Taboo follows James Keziah Delaney, a man who has been to the ends of the earth and...
The Haunting of Highdown Hall (Psychic Surveys #1)
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Have you discovered the bestselling Psychic Surveys series yet? Perfect for fans of Stephen King,...
Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners
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More than a quarter-century after his death, James Baldwin remains an unparalleled figure in...
Kristy H (1252 KP) rated The Broken Girls in Books
Mar 20, 2018
This is a wonderful, captivating book that drew me in immediately. I've never read anything by Simone St. James, so this was a welcome surprise. The novel alternates between two time periods: 1950 and 2014. In 1950, we hear from four girls attending Idlewild Hall--Katie, CeCe, Sonia, and Roberta. One of the girls soon goes missing and her disappearance ties to 2014, where Fiona is both searching for more information about her sister's death and, eventually, more knowledge about the missing Idlewild student. It's incredibly well-done and extremely suspenseful, drawing you quickly into the narrative and the two separate but related worlds.
The book plays on the boarding school mystique and offers up more supernatural elements than I was expecting, but they somehow work here. The novel is creepy and not one I always wanted to be reading alone in the dark! Like some of my favorites, Jennifer McMahon and Carol Goodman, St. James has a flair for the eerie and the ghostly, and it works well in this context. The boarding school stands stark and haunting in the book-terrifying at times-and you feel the fear ooze across the pages from the various characters.
Indeed, St. James does a great job capturing her characters, whom practically come to life before your very eyes. The group from boarding school are excellent--each different in their own way--and Fiona is an excellent, complicated character as well. While the two eras stood alone, I enjoyed how the stories intermingled and slowly tangled together, making the book quite fascinating and a real page-turner. This one wasn't what I expected; at times, it could be quite heartbreaking and touching.
Overall, this is an incredibly well-done thriller. It's quite captivating with lovely characters. A great discovery. I received a copy of this novel from the publisher and Netgalley in return for an unbiased review. More at http://justacatandabookatherside.blogspot.com.
Olajide Olatunji recommended track Downtown by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis in This Unruly Mess I've Made by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis in Music (curated)
The Writer's Garden: How Gardens Inspired Our Best-Loved Authors
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Great things happen in gardens. No one can doubt the importance of the garden in Roald Dahl's life...
The Fortunate Ones
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At Twin Oaks Country Club, there are the fortunate ones, and then there are the rest of us: the...
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Above Head Height: A Five-a-Side Life
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'The Fever Pitch of five-a-side' TONY PARSONS A must-have for anyone who has ever played and enjoyed...