Category: 2020 Favorites

Yellow Wife by Sadeqa Johnson

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Rating: 5 out of 5.

This book was everything I wanted it to be! It was well-researched, well-written, and utterly drew me in. I could NOT put this book down, and then I could wait to come write about it!

Pheby is a slave, but has been promised freedom on her 18th birthday by her father & master. When the master falls ill and her mother dies, Pheby is sold to traders and taken to a jail to be held for auction. After catching the eye of the owner of the jail, she is moved into his home and soon becomes his mistress. This story follows Pheby’s life as she navigates the horrors of the jail created by her husband, Rubin. She must keep her children safe, but also finds the atrocious actions by Rubin to be more than she can handle. How can she balance the life she now lives?

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She Just Loved These Books – 2020 in Review

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5-Star Rated Reads

2020 has been a fabulous reading year for me, and I’d love to highlight my favorites for you! There are a variety of genres and I’ll continue to add to this list as I finish up December!

Use the links below to find the genre you would like to read about.

General Fiction – Or Books I Didn’t Know How Else to Classify!

The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult

This book was AMAZING! I can’t fully do this book justice in a review, but I’m going to try. It was incredibly researched and stuffed full of Egyptian history. The way Picoult writes this story, it absolutely draws you in. The characters are real and so captivating. I actually held my breath at times because I was so worried about what was going to happen!

Amazon ~ Goodreads

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Finlay Donovan Is Killing It by Elle Cosimano

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Rating: 5 out of 5.

This book is amazing! I was absolutely sucked into the story. The writing is wonderful, and the characters are just perfect! If you are a fan of the Stephanie Plum series, this one is right for you!!

Finlay is a divorced mom of two and working-to-make-ends-meet author. Her unpayable bills are piling up on her doorstep, and her ex-husband is threatening to sue for full custody of her children. After a meeting with her agent at a local Panera, Finlay finds a note from a neighboring diner offering her a lot of money to get rid of the lady’s husband. Finlay, an author, not a hitman, has no intention of doing anything with this, except call the number the lady left and explain that there was a misunderstanding. One thing leads to another, and Finlay ends up in the middle of a murder mystery.

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Escaping Eleven by Jerri Chisholm

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Rating: 5 out of 5.

This book was amazing! It kept me glued to the pages. The storyline was interesting, and I loved the characters!

This is a dystopian YA novel set generations after the earth has become too hot for humans to live on the surface. The wealthy leaders of Earth built enormous bunkers under the ground and brought laborers with them so that there would be people to run the underground cities and do all the work. Eve lives in Compound Eleven. She’s a lowly 2nd-floor inhabitant, however, it’s better than the 1st floor. Living on the 5th floor are the elite and the privileged. As she looks for a way to escape the compound, she accidentally befriends a 5th-floor boy. She finds that maybe not everyone on the 5th floor is bad…or are they?

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The White Door by Heather Kindt

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Rating: 5 out of 5.

The game just got real. Like really, really real.

Okay, if you have been reading this series, I cannot wait for you to grab this one! If you haven’t started this series, it is amazing, and you should absolutely read it! Please do not start the series with this book. This is a series that should be read in order. These are not stand-alone stories.

The White Door picks up pretty soon after the last book ends. We are literally thrown into the action within the first few pages, and it’s a heart-racing adventure from there on out. Someone is trying to kill Brek, and they don’t know who. Behind the white door, Meg and Brek discover yet another world, but this one proves to be so different from the previous ones. They find themselves thrown into crazy plans that have involved them from the start, and dangers that are proving to be more real than they could have ever expected.

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The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult

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Rating: 5 out of 5.
White library with lots of stairs and "Contemporary" text

This book was AMAZING! I am not going to be able to fully do this book justice in this review, but I’m going to try.

I must say how much incredibly detailed research obviously went into writing this book. It is stuffed full of Egyptian history and information that was amazingly detailed. I learned so much through reading this, and I loved it.

This story is hard for me to explain because I do not want to spoil it for any reader, so I’m going to leave a lot out. If you’ve read the book, I’d love to discuss it!

So, the story itself, it’s about love, life, death, family, everything that builds us into the people we are. This book ripped me up and then put me back together. I couldn’t quite figure out how this was going to end. It’s about The Book of Two Ways, an Egyptian path for the dead to find their afterlife. The chapters are broken into a story of two ways. Water or Land / Boston or Egypt. Sometimes I struggle jumping back and forth to different stories in a book, but with this, every time we switched to the “other way” I was so deeply invested I didn’t want that one to end, then we’d jump to the “other way” and I’d get invested all over again.

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Will Santa Stop Here? by Christy Garnhart

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Rating: 5 out of 5.

This Christmas is different than any of our children have experienced so far. There are so many questions that I know my children have about how Santa is going to make it to our home. Is he quarantined too? Will he have a mask? How will he keep from getting sick? Things that while I can say, yes, yes, it will all be fine, reading a book about it seems to help them feel better!

Will Santa Stop Here? was the perfect book to help alleviate my kiddos’ fears. The story features a little girl questioning how Santa is going to make it to her house this pandemic Christmas Eve. While her mother assures her, she still wonders. But then, she hears something, and creeping downstairs she gets to experience how Santa and his elves are handling their very important job of delivering gifts.

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Call of Vultures by Kate Kessler

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Rating: 5 out of 5.

This book was amazing! This is the second book in The Killian Delaney Novels, and if you haven’t read the first book, Seven Crows, I highly recommend it! I’ll add a link to my review of this book a little later in the post!

This series features Killian, our kick-A female lead character, a girl with a unique set of talents to take care of crappy villains. I love her because she’s a flawed character and struggles with her own demons. It makes her relatable. Her talent for tracking down the bad guys, however, is beyond anything I could ever do, and I love reading about her adventures!

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The Haunting of Beatrix Greene by Rachel Hawkins, Ash Parsons, Vicky Alvear Shecter

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Rating: 5 out of 5.

This was quite the spooky, atmospheric read for October! I’m so happy I picked this one up! Along with the creepy storyline, it’s a quick read, so I felt like we jumped right into the scary stuff, which made it quite a fun read!

Beatrix Greene is the kind of spiritual medium that doesn’t actually believe in ghosts, nor does she actually connect with the other side. Instead, she feels that she can read people well, and provide them with what they want to hear to feel consoled about their loss. When James propositions her to spend one night in Ashbury Manor to decide if there is or is not a ghost, she agrees, knowing that he is setting her up to expose her as a fraud. James though seems to have other motives for the request of her assistance, and as they enter the house, they will soon realize that they have made a terrible mistake.

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Kingdom of the Wicked by Kerri Maniscalco

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Rating: 5 out of 5.

I loved, loved, loved this book! This is my first book by Kerri Maniscalco, and now I have to go back and read her other ones!

Twins Emilia and Vittoria are witches, and they have grown up with the knowledge that there are Wicked princes of Hell that threaten their lives. They must always wear their special necklaces that help guard them and continue to use protective magic. Then one night, Vittoria is brutally murdered with her heart ripped out of her chest. Emilia discovers Vittoria and vows vengeance, even if it means using dark magic, something her grandmother has spent her entire life warning the twins about. Her use of dark magic goes a bit wrong when she summons, not a demon to assist her, but one of the very Princes of Hell she has worked to avoid her entire life. The two are immediate enemies, and yet they both seem to want the same thing; to find Vittoria’s murderer.

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The Haunting at Bonaventure Circus by Jaime Jo Wright

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Rating: 4 out of 5.

Another fun, spooky read for October in the books! I highly suggest this one if you enjoy historical fiction and some spooky story lines!

This dual-timeline takes us back to 1928 when the Bonaventure Circus is thriving. Pippa Ripley is the adopted daughter of the circus owner, but wants to know where she came from. She knows she is the daughter of people in the circus, but her parents will not give her more information. There is someone who knows though, “The Watchman” sends her letters telling her little bits of information. She starts to hears stories of a serial killer on the circus route that people are calling “The Watchman”. Is her watchman an innocent person just trying to help her, or is there something more sinister going on?

In present day, the Bonaventure Circus is nothing more than a dilapidated building that used to be the circus’ home. Chandler Faulk’s uncle has her evaluating the property, which he just purchased, to understand if it should be flipped or restored. When spooky things start happening in the building, Chandler starts to question if all these ghost stories are a bit more. Then, she stumbles onto evidence of the serial killer, and she becomes part of the story, rather than an outsider.

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How Much It May Storm by A.N. Willis

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Rating: 5 out of 5.

I cannot even explain how much I loved this story! What an absolutely amazing mix of coming of age, paranormal, and mystery!

This dual-timeline story takes the reader between 1918 and 1943 to unravel the deep-rooted secrets of a family and their nurse. In 1918, Millie arrives in a small town in Colorado, recently hired to provide nursing assistance to two Gainsbury family members with the Spanish Flu. Millie finds a spark of romance in the family’s son, Edward, who just returned from the war. Millie has a secret though, that she protects to keep others safe, and Edward may be getting close to understanding what it is.

In 1943, Dinah has recently said goodbye to her brother as he heads off to war, and she’s finding herself alone and sad. In her loneliness, she visits their favorite hiding spot but experiences some upsetting occurrences…sounds and handprints on the glass that she cannot explain. And then a man dressed in a WWI uniform. She begins to think she is being haunted, and her story becomes intertwined with Millie’s as Dinah searches for the truth about the man in uniform, and what happened to Millie.

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