"Will I help him make something of his life? Who will help me? Why does everyone presume that I, as damaged merchandise, forfeit any claim to happiness?
That I expect nothing, have no ambitions or longings of my own? When was it agreed that my lot would be to gladly serve as a prop and a crutch for others who are whole?"


I'm not really sure how to review this book to be honest. At first I really struggled to get into it since it was written in second person almost as a note or diary format. But after awhile I really started liking this writing and saw why it worked so well for this story. The setting appears to be colonial puritan America. Which makes it have strong religious beliefs that make the townspeople and her own family act certain ways towards her due to what they believed happened to her.

We follow Judith who was kidnapped as a young child and was returned with her tongue having been cut off. In the time she was gone a tragedy happened to her family leaving her mother cold towards her and her brother was exactly as he had been before she was taken.
With her mother not wanting her to talk at all due to the sounds it made when she did attempt, Judith is pretty much cut off from the rest of the world besides people being able to read her facial expressions and her nodding her head yes or no. Which causes people to just assume what had happened to her.
Causing her to be seen as an outcast that the rest of the townspeople should not be around.
As the story unfolds we get to slowly know what happened to Judith and what helped her get through it. Which was her love for a boy named Lucas. While her love for Lucas did get quite obsessive at times it was also understandable since she was always having to live in her head pretty much, and always having one-sided conversations with herself.

While this book may have been set in colonial times it also brought up a lot of issues that we have going on today still. Which showed me while we may have changed a lot over the years as a society we still have a lot more to change. Purity was a big thing in this book and it also showed how people tend to act once they assume that you've done certain things.

As for the mystery part of the story and why she was kidnapped and who killed her best friend. I was completely wrong. I was assuming it was someone else the whole time and when it was finally revealed I was shocked.

Throughout the whole story I was rooting for Judith to be able to get the confidence to talk, so that she could tell the townspeople what really happened to her, and that she was really smart, and that she knew a lot of things.

Overall I really did enjoy this book and hope to read more of Julie Berry's books in the future.
 

The Woman with No Name is based on the true story of one courageous woman during WWII who helped save countless lives and kept the Nazis confused. 

Yvonne Rudellete's life has not gone the way she once thought it would, stuck in a loveless marriage, and with a daughter who is now grown she is ready to remake herself. She does that by joining the war effort and becoming one of Britain's first female sabotage agents. She uses the skills that they train her with, alongside what she has learned all her life to hide in plain sight, create distractions, and cause chaos to make life hard for the Nazis who have invaded France. With a crew of other agents, and French resistance fighters she really does set parts of France ablaze and saves countless lives in the process. 

Overall this book was good and interesting. I loved how we got to see a different side to WWII with a female agent and the resistance working together to sabotage the Nazis. I love spy and secret agent books and this one did not disappoint. It did drag at times especially towards the middle when it felt like we were just constantly waiting to hear anything from Britain, and then in the last quarter everything was just full steam ahead and things did not stop. Yvonne and several other people in this book are based on real people and you could tell when that was going on because of how much more detailed it got when it came to the sabotage schemes. 
I think this book will be great for people who enjoy reading about this time period and spies. 

My Lady Jane is one of those fun historical fiction books that take a part of history and rewrites it into a fantastical story. 

It won't be for everyone. But it will be for people who want a little fun and like a reimagining of stories. 

Jane is one of those characters that you immediately love (or at least I did). She is fun and very serious at the same time when it comes to certain things. 
We get to see things from Jane's husband Gifford's point of view and King Edwards's point of view.  The way they go about saving England and how they get so many people working together is amazing. I felt like we got to see each of them shine in their own ways and grow as people in a short amount of time. 

These three pov's help stitch the story together into a fantastical and fun story that will have you laughing, smiling, and frustrated throughout it. 

Overall I loved this story and how it webbed fantasy into the history elements of this time in England. 
I cannot wait to read the rest of the books now and see what the tv-series ends up being like. 

I'm going to start out this review by saying this book was not for me. I realized that fairly quickly into it, but because I did originally get this as an e-arc from netgalley I wanted to push through so I could review it. 

White as Silence, Red as Song is one of those books that was a part of Siclit when it came out. I've read several other books in that category, but none have annoyed me as much as this book did. Maybe it's because this book was originally written in Italian and something was lost in translation. Still, none of the characters acted the age of teenagers, nor did they talk like teenagers even 2018 teenagers they did not act like. Which has me thinking that it is maybe because it was for the Italian audience and then later on got translated to English. 

At times this book did remind me of Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl, but it was not up to that level of quality or heartfeltness that that book was. Instead, this book is solely about Leo and how his obsession with the girl Beatrice causes him to grow up suddenly because he wants to love her and convince her that he is the perfect one for her. That just made the book not work for me personally. I just couldn't get behind that premise.

I do think others will enjoy it especially if they enjoy other books in the Siclit category.  

These books are so fun to read! I loved being back with Alice and Iris and their crew of crime-solving friends as they solved this case and even got to know more about the celebrity Mona Moody that we learned about in the first book. This book is very fast-paced because of all the people involved and because of how Alice and Iris must figure out who the suspect is and how this connects to the past, before the local police catch on to what they are doing and arrest them for interfering with a case. I read this book in two days because I needed to know who it was and how it all connected together with so much time in between the two cases. 

The Night in Question has everything from secrets, murder, lies, rich people being terrible humans, and history! 

This book just wasn’t for me. I think for someone fresh out of highschool this book might work but even then it’s still not great at figuring out life skills as a whole. It’s more about emotional well being which is not what I was expecting going into it. 

My Rating 3.5 stars
(Listened to a finished audiobook copy)
Ladies of the Lake follows several different characters from the time they are in school, till they have become old women. Our main characters are Adelaide and Do1900s earlyrothy, who are very different people but become the best of friends for a period of time. The Ladies of the Lake was formed when four friends met at a boarding school, and supported and were there for one another in a way no one else was during the most important formative years. Adelaide and Dorothy continued to work at the boarding school after graduating and they met two young men who up until WWI started seemed like it was going to end perfectly. But with the start of WWI, rules changing, and people's opinions towards the men they love heritage things get tense at times, and tragedy strikes one of our main characters causing them to not see one another for a long time. 


Overall I did enjoy this book, but I did struggle with it at times due to some of the choices the characters were making. Adelaide while I understand why she did what she did in order to protect someone she loved, also made it so other people who loved her thought that she was dead causing them a lot of heartache as well. As for Dorothy I really struggled with her character and went back and forth between liking her or not liking her and at times just plain being exasperated with her because of the choices she was making. The setting behind the time a little before WWI started and going through the start of the great depression was interesting and I enjoyed seeing a different time period in historical fiction for a change. 

I think if you like saga's and seeing characters go through different stages of life then this book is for you. 


The audio narrator was good. However, at times I did struggle to tell if Adelaide or Dorothy was talking because of how every few chapters we switched pov's.