An Affair at Stonecliffe

An Affair at Stonecliffe- Candace Camp

HQN

Release Date: May 24, 2022

Rating: 📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: Noelle Rutherford would do anything for her young son, Gil. A fiercely independent woman recently widowed, Noelle is determined to raise Gil alone. After all, her late husband Adam Rutherford married her for love, which infuriated his aristocratic family. Gil is Noelle’s whole world, and she will not have him wrested from her by haughty nobles.

But she may not have a choice unless she’s prepared to run.
 
One awful night, Noelle is confronted by Carlisle Thorne, a handsome yet severe, irascible man sent by the Rutherfords. Noelle is horrified when Carlisle offers her money in exchange for taking Gil to be raised at the Rutherford estate, Stonecliffe. Knowing that Carlisle will use any means necessary to take her son from her, Noelle flees, Gil at her side.
 
Thus begins an epic rivalry that spans five years—a battle of wits between two unforgettable characters bound together by fate and fortune. However, when danger threatens, these enemies must come together to protect what matters most… even if it means losing their hearts.

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This book in a new series by Candace Camp was so wonderful to read, I ended up not being able to put it down and read the whole thing in one day! You instantly connect to the emotions of Noelle, a young widow trying to raise her infant son, cope with her grief at her husband's death, her fear of being destitute, and then in comes Carlisle Thorne, a friend of her husband's aristocratic family, wanting to buy her baby and take it away from her to her husband's family. She runs and is on the run for the next five years, avoiding attempts of kidnappers to take her son. When Noelle and Carlisle meet again her fear and his exasperation come across as if you are feeling them yourself, and the reader starts to wonder (before the main characters) if there is something else going on- because if Carlisle is not behind the kidnapping attempts, who is? 

There are some excellent plot twists right up to the end to keep you guessing. Every secondary character is well done, and essential, and you instantly want to know more about them. I can't wait for characters like Nathan, Annabeth, and Sloane to have their own books to discover their secrets! Noelle and Carlisle shift from enemies to lovers with what felt like the right amount of timing and tension, and a delicious amount of chemistry and misunderstanding. Noelle may be one of the strongest characters I've read in awhile- she takes everything life throws at her and refuses to break under any of it. 

Beautifully written, well paced, and delightful characters, this is an absolute must read for romance readers. Candace Camp fans will rejoice in the start of this new series!

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

It Girl

 

The It Girl- Ruth Ware

Simon and Schuster/Gallery

Release Date: July 12, 2022

Rating: 📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: April Clarke-Cliveden was the first person Hannah Jones met at Oxford.

Vivacious, bright, occasionally vicious, and the ultimate It girl, she quickly pulled Hannah into her dazzling orbit. Together, they developed a group of devoted and inseparable friends—Will, Hugh, Ryan, and Emily—during their first term. By the end of the year, April was dead.

Now, a decade later, Hannah and Will are expecting their first child, and the man convicted of killing April, former Oxford porter John Neville, has died in prison. Relieved to have finally put the past behind her, Hannah’s world is rocked when a young journalist comes knocking and presents new evidence that Neville may have been innocent. As Hannah reconnects with old friends and delves deeper into the mystery of April’s death, she realizes that the friends she thought she knew all have something to hide…including a murder.

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In this new psychological thriller Ruth Ware introduces us to an unlikely group of friends at an Oxford college, all orbiting around "It Girl" April- rich, beautiful, intelligent, and talented who seemingly has it all. Yet by the end of their second term April is dead, murdered in her rooms. A decade later it comes out that maybe the man sentenced for the murder didn't actually do it- which naturally makes you wonder, if not him, who did kill April?

This is the second Ruth Ware book I've read (One by One was the other) and I definitely liked this one more than I expected to. The book is split into alternating "Before" and "After" chapters (as Hannah's life is divided into 'before April's murder' and 'after April's murder'), introducing us to narrator Hannah, "It Girl" April, and their friends Will, Ryan, Hugh, and Emily, as well as building them up over the course of their college experiences. In the "After" sections it is ten years later, Hannah and Will have moved to Edinburg and are expecting their first child, and the man convicted of killing April dies in prison. They are pushed back into the trauma of the murder and the media circus surrounding the murder and the trial and you get a really good sense of how traumatizing both events were for Hannah, Will, and the others- and how they reacted to it in very different ways. But you also see, before she does I think, that while Hannah might see herself as weak, she is anything but- when the idea comes up that Neville might have been innocent Hannah does face it and does start to confront the memories surrounding that time period, asking herself what she might have gotten wrong and who might have killed April if not Neville. She's a far better friend, in life or death, then April probably deserves, because she doesn't let it go. It effects her marriage and her health, but she feels like she owes it to April and to Neville, a man who sexually harassed her at college, to find out the truth. Is she naive, innocent, and in over her head? Yes. Is that annoying? Yes, often. But it somehow makes her the character you've read a hundred times before and at the same time someone you can pull for the whole way because you see something new through her eyes. You want her to understand that April is a vicious, nasty piece of work while at the same time hoping that Hannah was somehow making April a better person. You want Hannah's innocence to remain intact while knowing it won't, which makes you worry about what will be left when the dust settles- because you care about her and her marriage and her friends through the spell that Ware casts page by page.

There are well-written descriptions of Oxford and what the college and college life are like; wrenching psychological cases of survivor's guilt and looks into our morbid cultural fascination with "it" murders and what they do to the people left behind in the cases; tension weaves through the pages even before anything happens without you able to quite identify why; red herrings leap like spawning salmon; excellent twists and turns getting to the 'who', 'how' and 'why'; and friendships and relationships that will haunt you to the last page.

A must read summer psychological thriller for the mystery lover!

I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

Bitch: On the Female of the Species

Bitch: On The Female of the Species- Lucy Cooke

Basic Books/Hachette

Release Date: June 14, 2022

Rating: 📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: A fierce, funny, and revolutionary look at the queens of the animal kingdom  

Studying zoology made Lucy Cooke feel like a sad freak. Not because she loved spiders or would root around in animal feces: all her friends shared the same curious kinks. The problem was her sex. Being female meant she was, by nature, a loser.  

Since Charles Darwin, evolutionary biologists have been convinced that the males of the animal kingdom are the interesting ones—dominating and promiscuous, while females are dull, passive, and devoted.  

In Bitch, Cooke tells a new story. Whether investigating same-sex female albatross couples that raise chicks, murderous mother meerkats, or the titanic battle of the sexes waged by ducks, Cooke shows us a new evolutionary biology, one where females can be as dynamic as any male. This isn‘t your grandfather’s evolutionary biology. It’s more inclusive, truer to life, and, simply, more fun.

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I start this review with a confession: I absolutely picked up this book because of the cover. Hyenas are among my favorite animals (even more so after reading Bitch) and a cover featuring a hyena? I wanted to know what that book was about! Reading the synopsis I was a little concerned the science would go over my head, but I knew I had to read this book (or listen, as the case may be- I listened to the audiobook, excellently narrated by author Lucy Cooke herself). So kudos to the cover designers for drawing me in, but after that it was all Lucy. Along the way I started sharing bits with my co-workers and they came to expect updates after lunch breaks. I think I sold this book to all of my colleagues at the indie-bookstore where we work before the book came out based on "So I'm eating my sandwich and learning about . . ." One day this included a customer who was looking for a book to send to her daughter doing a semester abroad in England- her boyfriend had just dumped her for being too "feminist and empowered". I told her that was (unintentionally from his point of view, sadly) the best compliment to give someone and mentioned this book, and that it was probably already out in the UK. A fabulously well done mix of science facts both past and present and female empowerment, it seemed the perfect recommendation for a teenager who had been dumped for being "too feminist".

With that as a background, in case you can't tell, I loved this book and was fascinated from start to finish. Lucy Cooke, an author, National Geographic explorer, and award-winning documentary filmmaker with a master’s degree in zoology from Oxford University, has a brilliant writing style that is both irreverent, witty, and direct. Whether describing Charles Darwin's original evolutionary theory or her own experiences scooping orca poop (yes, that is a scientific thing) you feel as if Cooke is talking directly to you and sharing stories that might interest you. Or shock/enrage you as you come to understand that the "pure science" myth they teach in school is just that- a myth. Females have been sidelined from more than just conducting scientific research since Victorian times, Darwin and the Victorian patriarchy considered females the passive sex and focused their studies on the active, more interesting, males in the animal world. This has carried over far longer into the twentieth and twenty first centuries than I expected, often influencing studies by scientists who would ignore data to get the results they wanted, marginalizing and limiting the amount of research done on females (human health care isn't mentioned but I think we all would agree its an example that would fit here!).

Cooke takes us across the globe and around the animal kingdom, from my beloved hyenas to lesbian albatrosses; from the dark side of matriarchal meerkats they probably don't show on Discovery Channel documentaries to menopausal orcas; a wide variety of spiders and insects and why they eat their sexual partners; sexually promiscuous song birds who completely freaked out scientists; a wide range of matriarchal species defying stereotypical male domination; and "Evolution's Rainbow", perhaps the new theory in evolution as modern science evolves to accept a non-binary approach to nature, redefining what gender means and its place in the natural world.

Bitch: On the Female of the Species takes a humorous but thoroughly researched look at evolution and nature, and (I think) fairly successfully demolishes the stale and sexist myths of a male dominated animal kingdom once and for all. Cooke highlights research done by scientists of all genders to show that moving forward is a new world of thought, working hard to question everything the patriarchal establishment has entrenched as dogma over the centuries. Here, females have their day, their spotlight, as scientists try to learn more and show us what their lives are like, asking the reader to question what they think they know about the world around them, including what it means to be "female".

If you love animals, science, or want to learn about a new avenue of feminism, you absolutely need to read Bitch: On the Female of the Species.

  

I received a free ALC from Libro.fm in exchange for an honest review