June: A Novel

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June” is written with a dual time line: the present and 1955. Eerily for me, the 1955 time line mirrored the exact dates I was reading the novel. I guess the calendar that year was the same as 2016. When it was Friday, June 3rd in 1955 I was reading it on Friday, June 3rd, 2016! Cool! Of course nothing is what it seems. It’s pertinent that the house is near Dracula’s cradle at Whitby; and when the paranormal research team arrive in the 70s strand, Loo and her savage sister Bee find Victorian clothes to dress up in, just like the blood-stained maidens in the books that fill their electricity-less farm-house. Of course Bee and Loo know how a haunting is meant to go: they are clever and utterly isolated, and they have a grudge to settle. But that isn’t all. I would like to thank Blogging For Books for a print copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.*

June 2021 Book Releases To Read This Summer | Booklist Queen June 2021 Book Releases To Read This Summer | Booklist Queen

Kampfner is right to ask us to imagine a Britain with more honest politicians, a more serious press, a more mature understanding of its place in the world, more industry, smaller regional disparities and indeed better windows. Yet, apart from the windows, Britain surely once had all these things. For one of the lessons of this book is not just that things are different in different places, but that they change over time, and things don’t necessarily get better.

Not sure what to read this month? Here are some excellent new paperbacks, including Alan Davies' shocking memoir, Monique Roffey's Costa prize winner and a ‘near-perfect’ ghost story

What makes the novel sing is how Roffey fleshes out these mythical goings-on with pin-sharp detail from the real world, as Aycayia, hidden away in David’s bedroom, navigates the perils (and pleasures) of life on land. After her tail rots, she relearns to walk in an old pair of David’s green suede Adidas. Her nostrils bleed “all kind of molluscs and tiny crabs”. Like so much British writing on Germany, Kampfner’s fine Why the Germans Do It Better is also a book about Britain. We need to see, in effect, post-Brexit Britain in a German mirror, not in a fantasy global one. This mirror does not flatter: Kampfner sees a Britain “mired in monolingual mediocrity, its reference points extending to the US and not much further”. It borrows and it shops, and lives in a nostalgic dreamworld. Don’t be misled. While Mannion’s debut ably fulfils the promise of its suspenseful start, providing carefully orchestrated lawlessness, bare-fisted violence and a long-haired predator sinisterly named “Barbie Man”, this is no crime novel. As the story unfurls, its deeper menace and mystery will derive not from child abduction but from secretive family dysfunction and the ever-confounding travails of adolescence. Both mother and daughter are much haunted by the question of what is in their power to give, and what is stolen from them. Both need to articulate their own stories, but it’s no simple task.

June Releases Books - Goodreads

Rich in character, culture, history, art, travel, mystery, and romance. Of course, as the norm, I tend to be more enthralled with the secret past of the two friends June (18 yrs old) and Lindie (lesbian 14 yrs. old) and all which surround them, than the present. Something sinister and dark building around them from Ohio to Hollywood. Leave the World Behind is an extraordinary book, at once smart, gripping and hallucinatory. It’s no surprise that Netflix is working on an adaptation starring Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts. When future generations (if that term doesn’t sound over-optimistic at the moment) want to know what it was like to live through the nightmare of 2020, this is the novel they’ll reach for. There are leaps of joy in Actress, for all its darkness. It sparkles with light, rapid, shrugging wit; cliches are skewered in seconds, and thespian types are affectionately set in motion to carry on chatting in the margins. Memories of tender, uncoercive love shine out between the illness and confused attachments and violence.Moss’s ability to conjure up the fleeting and sometimes agonised tenderness of family life is unmatched, and here she sketches so lightly the all-but-invisible conflicts and compromises that can make cohabitation both a joy and a living hell. Observing the way we subtly edit ourselves and one another – the limits that puts on us, as well as the strengths it creates – is Moss’s metier.

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how the author some how brings even the house to life , how she makes it have feelings and even dreams of the past and present I am on the brink of selecting Malibu Rising as my BOTM, but I tend to get burned when there is too much hype around a book. I may already have too many advance context clues on this one. Babalola isn’t afraid of the cliches of romance. In fact, a highlight of this collection of love stories is that for a moment, readers forget to anticipate the ending and instead get wrapped up in the warmth these stories offer. This is a collection for those of us, like Babalola, who love love.

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From the New York Times bestselling author of Bittersweet comes a novel of suspense and passion about a terrible mistake made sixty years ago that threatens to change a modern family forever. When I did come to the end I could not help but have tears in my eyes. There were so many things that happened, so many revelations, secrets, murder... the list goes on and it made for a perfect story. But this is my opinion, you need to read it for yourself. And I leave you with one extra excerpt of the dream people....