Unfortunately, the book begins with Junie being murdered. Eve’s saving grace is her daughter, Junie, who basically saved her from otherwise living the same dark, drug-riddled life that her mother lives. Main character Eve is a waitress in the poor Ozark town she grew up in. This rural noir stakes Engel’s claim to that dystopian terrain somewhere between Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects and Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone. The Familiar Dark is set in rural Missouri. Without sacrificing any of the narrative’s ferocious urgency, Engel gradually discloses a few of Eve’s own guilty secrets-on the way to some gut-wrenching final revelations. Feeling she has nothing left to lose, a vengeance-bent Eve ignores Cal’s warnings to leave investigating to the professionals and begins asking questions of dangerous people with plenty to hide. Junie’s single mom, Eve, a feisty, funny, sometimes foulmouthed diner waitress, is shattered by the news, but she swiftly becomes enraged by what she sees as a less than vigorous probe by the local police, including her idolized older brother, Cal, who she suspects may be writing off the murders as collateral damage from the meth ring run by their own abusive, long-estranged pit bull of a mother. The stark prologue of this harrowing thriller from Engel ( The Roanoke Girls) recounts the final moments of 12-year-old best friends Izzy Logan and Junie Taggert, slaughtered on an abandoned playground in their impoverished hometown in the Missouri Ozarks.
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Although they make bad decisions, Ng conjurs up just the right amount of sympathy in her readers. Celeste Ng creates these detailed and flawed characters who you feel like you know, only a few pages in. I loved the pace of this book, and although it moved through time at its own ambling pace, the author used literary techniques to tell a mesmerising and convincing story, even though it felt completely new. And we learn about Hannah – my favourite character – the youngest child who is often overlooked, yet she overlooks nothing. We learn about Nath and his ambition and loneliness. We learn about Lydia, and how she was the favourite child, and that might have been the fatal flaw to the whole family. We get a close analysis of the parent’s marriage and how, although built on true love, it wasn’t necessarily built on acceptance. I thought it would be more focused on the mystery of Lydia’s death, but instead, it focused on the Lee family. I didn’t realise that it was going to be as heartbreaking and beautiful as it was. Trigger Warnings: Death, suicide, racism, sexism, and affairs. Slowly, we learn of the truth of that night, the foundations the family is built on as well as how they are treated, as an Asian-American family, in 1970’s Ohio. Synopsis: Lydia’s body is found in a local lake, and her death slowly breaks her family apart. Genre: Adult, Mystery, Historical Fiction But here we are, with a book that I adored in so so many ways. I READ A BOOK I ACTUALLY LIKED? I know, I can hardly believe it either. Do Atl and Domingo even stand a chance of making it out alive? Or will the city devour them all?Ī Macmillan Audio production from Tor Nightfire Vampires, humans, cops, and criminals collide in the dark streets of Mexico City. As the trail of corpses stretches behind her, local cops and crime bosses both start closing in. Her plan doesn’t include Domingo, but little by little, Atl finds herself warming up to the scrappy young man and his undeniable charm. Domingo is mesmerized.Ītl needs to quickly escape the city, far from the rival narco-vampire clan relentlessly pursuing her. Atl, the descendant of Aztec blood drinkers, is smart, beautiful, and dangerous. Domingo, a lonely garbage-collecting street kid, is just trying to survive its heavily policed streets when a jaded vampire on the run swoops into his life. Welcome to Mexico City, an oasis in a sea of vampires. From Silvia Moreno-Garcia, the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic, comes Certain Dark Things, a pulse-pounding neo-noir that reimagines vampire lore. His book became very popular because he toured the Netherlands promoting it by giving lectures about funny situations caused by misunderstandings and misinterpretations while communicating in the two languages. Brown was a well-known clergyman for the Scottish church in Rotterdam (The Netherlands) and fluent Dutch speaker. 'Cuey-na-Gael' is perhaps best represented in translation as " Hugh the Scotchman", given Irwin Brown's devotion to all things Scots, or as he always put it, 'Scotch '. It is a Gaelic phrase identifying a native speaker of Gaelic, a member of the Gaeltacht a language group that includes both Irish and Erse, the language of the Scottish Highlanders. John Irwin Brown (1858-1937) deserves a comment. This curious pen-name ‘Cuey-na-Gael’ used by the English Rev. But the book that really caught my attention was “ An Irishman's Difficulties with the Dutch Language” (Rotterdam, 1908) by ‘Cuey-na-Gael’. The town, situated on the Mississippi River, was in many ways a splendid place to grow up. The Clemens family "now became almost destitute," wrote biographer Everett Emerson, and was forced into years of economic struggle - a fact that would shape the career of Twain. She became head of the household in 1847 when John died unexpectedly. His mother, by contrast, was a fun-loving, tenderhearted homemaker who whiled away many a winter's night for her family by telling stories. He was an unsmiling fellow according to one legend, young Sam never saw his father laugh. John Clemens worked as a storekeeper, lawyer, judge and land speculator, dreaming of wealth but never achieving it, sometimes finding it hard to feed his family. When he was 4 years old, his family moved to nearby Hannibal, a bustling river town of 1,000 people. Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the tiny village of Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, the sixth child of John and Jane Clemens. He was also a riverboat pilot, journalist, lecturer, entrepreneur and inventor. Mark Twain, whose real name was Samuel Clemens, was the celebrated author of several novels, including two major classics of American literature: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. |