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Autumn (3 KP) rated Breaking Beautiful in Books

Jan 19, 2018  
BB
Breaking Beautiful
6
6.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
this book wasn't what I was expecting. most YA novels aren't when I think about it. anyway, this was wonderful. I think of it as a story of a girl discovering who she is and what she needs.
thankfully I have about zero experience and only academic knowledge about abusive relationships. therefore my only complaint was that there was no explanation in how Allie got into this destructive relationship. from a moralistic standpoint this is probably one of the worst books to give a teenager in an abusive relationship. it demonstrates no means of prevention or plausible solutions of extracting oneself from such a situation. apparently your only means of escape are 1. getting the shit beat out of you until your partner thinks you're dead or 2. your partner dies. not terribly plausible.
points for self-actualization and having a character with CP; big WTF for not helping anyone.
  
LI
Leaving is My Colour
Amy Burns | 2017
8
8.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
<i>'I'm not looking for ecstasy at the foot of an altar or some cataclysmic, earth-shattering experience. All I want is to be enough for one person. For just one person to love me best. I want for one person to like me enough not to want to put his dick into another person'.</i>

____ 4.5 'Dysfunctional' stars

This book appealed to my dark sense of humour so much. Rachel is smart, witty and very funny, she is lost, dysfunctional and a little bit crazy. I liked her a lot.
After her family becomes very wealthy, Rachel gets mixed up in numerous failed marriages, drink, drugs and many trips to rehab. All she wants is to escape from the pits of 'rock-bottom', but can she do this by chasing unrealistic expectations? Will she accept help from her ultimately flawed family? This is her story.
  
Escape from New York (1981)
Escape from New York (1981)
1981 | Action, Sci-Fi
8.2 (20 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"Escape From New York, because that’s the one that made me want to make movies. It was a fantasy world. It was like, “What? There’s a wall around New York? It’s a prison? You can do that? You can just make stuff like that up?” That’s a lot of freedom; I thought that was very freeing. I was twelve when I saw that, twelve or thirteen. And I saw that [John Carpenter] wrote it, directed it, and did the music, and I was just like, “This guy’s doing everything. You can do that?” It just felt like, it was so renegade. It was independently done, and it made me want to start making movies, and I started making movies from that point on. It was just very inspiring. I knew I had a lot of interest, and that made me… That was movie that just really marked my life."

Source
  
Dead Simple (Roy Grace book 1)
Dead Simple (Roy Grace book 1)
Peter James | 2006 | Crime
10
8.6 (5 Ratings)
Book Rating
Can’t put this book down (2 more)
Familiar area
Good series
Gripping
Contains spoilers, click to show
This first book of the Roy grace series is brilliant. I was instantly hooked, I couldn’t put this book down it was so good

What drew me to these books is the location they are set in. Visually the area is so well described which is great for Imagening the area, the people the story...

I needed to know weather Michael would escape! Would Davey finally admit he’s been talking to someone on a walk or talkie.

I love this the story is focused on different point of veiws rather than one person. You get to experience roys life, Michaels life and Daveys life.

Michael the joker his friends decide to play a big prank on his that goes horrible wrong for everyone. They all get into and accident only on friend survived, the only one that knows Micheal location who is due to get married. He doesn’t let the police know of his friendly location who
Is trapped under ground in a coffin.

You get to experience how Micheal feels, what he thinks, desperate for the guy that has the other end of the walkie talkie to save him and find his location before time runs out!

I love that we have a story background of Roy grace, his wife just left one day and he’s never seen or Heard from her since. Is she dead or alive, did she just up and leave with no note. What happened to sandy!? I need to know and this is what gets you hooked. Sandy where are too? What happened ? I hope we find out in one of the books.
  
40x40

ClareR (6225 KP) rated The Last in Books

Jan 22, 2019 (Updated Jan 22, 2019)  
The Last
The Last
Hanna Jameson | 2019 | Dystopia, Fiction & Poetry, Thriller
9
6.6 (5 Ratings)
Book Rating
This one's a bit too close for comfort...
Well, this was a bit of a disconcerting and frankly worrying book. but it's one that made me really think.
Set in present day, it follows Jon Keller, an American Historian, and his fellow guests at a hotel in Switzerland, following a nuclear war. Pretty much every major city in the world has been bombed. The majority of guests have left, trying to get back to their homes even thought the media has advised them against doing so (no aeroplanes, no public transport). Jon and a small group of other guests decide to stay and make the best of it.
Whilst checking water supplies in the roof storage tanks, they find the body of a child, and Jon decides to investigate.
The book is written in Jon's voice as he writes a diary, a history, of his and the other guests survival, and his investigation.
I really liked this. It wasn't sensationalised, it all seemed so reasonable, and in our current worldwide political climate, so plausible - which is what made it really scary. It did have a bit of the "Huis Clos" (a play by Jean Paul Sartre) feeling about it: a feeling of being trapped with the same day coming around again and again, no escape, stuck with the same people that you neither particularly like or trust. And I liked that about it.
By the way, in the advent of a nuclear holocaust, Switzerland would seem to be a pretty civilised place to be 'stuck'.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Viking for the copy of this book to read and review!
  
Victor Frankenstein (2015)
Victor Frankenstein (2015)
2015 | Drama
Victor Frankenstein is basically a prequel to Mary Shelly’s book, Frankenstein, where we get to meet Igor and a younger Frankenstein as they get to meet each other.

We start off with our story teller, Igor played by Daniel Radcliffe, and how he came to be rescued by our movies namesake, Victor Frankenstein played by James McAvoy. The movie begins showing the trials Igor went through, growing up, as the lowest sideshow freak who just happened to learn how to read and become a self-taught medic for the circus that keeps him. Victor came to the circus to find more animal parts to make his homunculus, which he is building out of various animal parts he has been able to procure from zoos, as his prototype for his ultimate endeavor, making a human and bring it back to life.
 
Igor and Frankenstein are brought together when Igor’s paramour Lorelei falls from her trapeze and they both run to help her. Victor is about to give up and let her die when the Igor’s genius shows through and is able to save her with his quick thinking and knowledge of the human anatomy. Victor’s shrew perception bring him to offer Igor a new life and to escape from the circus.
 
I give Victor Frankenstein 4 out of 5 stars only due to the fact that being a prequel to the novel and not the many movies about Frankenstein and his Monster will confuse many. If you go in expecting an action movie instead of a film done in the noir horror genre in the styles before the 1950’s, you will be disappointed.
  
    Cartagena

    Cartagena

    7.0 (1 Ratings) Rate It

    Tabletop Game

    Cartagena takes as its theme the famous 1672 pirate-led jailbreak from the fortress of Cartagena....

The Stillwater Girls
The Stillwater Girls
Minka Kent | 2019
10
9.5 (2 Ratings)
Book Rating
Two sisters raised in fear are about to find out why in a chilling novel of psychological suspense from the author of The Thinnest Air.
Ignorant of civilization and cautioned against its evils, nineteen-year-old Wren and her two sisters, Sage and Evie, were raised in off-the-grid isolation in a primitive cabin in up-state New York. When the youngest grows gravely ill, their mother leaves with the child to get help from a nearby town. And they never return.
As months pass, hope vanishes. Supplies are low. Livestock are dying. A brutal winter is bearing down. Then comes the stranger. He claims to be looking for the girls’ mother, and he’s not leaving without them.
To escape, Wren and her sister must break the rule they've grown up with: never go beyond the forest.
Past the thicket of dread, they come upon a house on the other side of the pines. This is where Wren and Sage must confront something more chilling than the unknowable. They’ll discover what’s been hidden from them, what they’re running from, and the secrets that have left them in the dark their entire lives.

This was my first novel by Minka Kent and it was quite a suspenseful story.
The chapters switched between two characters which was good as well.
Wren, Sage and Evie are three sisters and their mother has been raising them in the forest away from all of civilization.
This is a great story that will have you on the edge of your seat from the first chapter. Very well written.
Loved the plot and the pace. Characters were very believable.
The ending is such an unexpected twist.
Will definitely be reading more from this author.
Highly recommend.

Thank you Thomas & Mercer and NetGalley for a copy of The Stillwater Girls. I voluntarily read and reviewed this book