By the Light of Embers
10.0
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It's 1954, and twenty-two-year-old Lucia Lafleur has always dreamed of following in her father’s...
Historical Fiction Literary Fiction
Accidental Knight
10.0
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Accidentally wed to a screaming hot stranger. I inherited a freaking husband. Grandpa's will was...
HEA Happily Ever After contemporary romance fiction adult
Full Bodied Murder
7.0
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As the newest member of the Rose Avenue Wine Club, Halsey wants to expand her palate—not solve...
Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots
6.0
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Now a Netflix original series! Unorthodox is the bestselling memoir of a young Jewish woman’s...
This is a sweeping novel that gives a lot (!) of details about wine and vineyards. The Hollander family owns their Long Island winery—belonging to matriarch Vivian and her husband, Leonard. Leonard, who is quite firm in his ideas about gender roles, would not let their daughter Leah take over, so she runs a cheese shop in New York City. Leah’s daughter Sadie is struggling in college with her thesis.
When they all converge at the vineyard, they discover Leonard is thinking of selling. He refuses to accept any of Leah or Vivian’s ideas to help save it. But when Sadie finds Vivian’s trashy old novels from her book club days, the three women come together. It’s fun to hear about the old novels (you’ll enjoy this book if you like Krantz or Collins) and watch the women triumph over Leonard, who, honestly can be sort of awful. The themes of marriage, sexism, and family run strong and make this an interesting read, even if the characters sometimes frustrate you to no end. 3 stars.
Hazel (2934 KP) rated The Collective in Books
Jul 31, 2022
Unfortunately, we have all heard of cases where a child is abused or found dead, murdered or killed by someone else and the person thought to have committed that atrocity walks free. We all feel for the parents but what would you do if that parent was you? Would you want revenge and how far would you go?
Camille is that parent; her only child is gone and her marriage has ended.
Grief has no time scale and after five years, the pain is still as raw, if not more so as the person she believed murdered her beautiful daughter is walking free and getting on with their lives. She has to do something but what?
Enter the collective ... a secret online group of mainly mothers who will help you get the justice you feel you deserve by working together.
Camille now has purpose but how far will she go?
With a great plot and interesting characters written at a pace that was quite slow at first but increased as the story developed, this book is a great thriller and certainly had me gripped from the start waiting to see how it all turned out.
Thank you must go to The Orion Publishing Group and NetGalley for enabling me to read The Collective and share my views.
Olivia has returned to her childhood home, escaping from an abusive marriage, to take over her family’s beekeeping business. Everything is going really well for her, until the day that her son Asher is accused of murdering his girlfriend, Lily. Olivia is wracked with feelings of guilt and fear: could he be like his father? Olivia can’t be sure if he’s done this, whether or not he’s violent like his father, or whether someone else has murdered her.
I usually avoid books written by two people - and I couldn’t tell you why! Picoult writes Olivia’s parts, Finney Boylan writes Lily’s. And honestly, I couldn’t see any wildly different writing styles between the two authors. Both of them just seem to nail the characters. Perfectly.
Olivia and Lily are both imperfect characters - as are we all - and they were both so realistically written. They were both living and breathing characters. I was completely invested in them both, even though I knew Lily’s story could only go one way.
This is a great book, and one that I’ve often thought about since reading it. If you read it, you’ll see why.
Recommended.
Should You Keep A Secret?
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Two women have learned something shocking about their friend’s husband—and revealing it could...
No Pistol Tastes the Same by Jacob Paul Patchen
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JP’s pistol tastes like bourbon. Sergeant JP Grimm didn’t pull the trigger. Now his Marine...
Suspense Military PTSD