hannabelle

So I work at a library, and sometimes if the day is slow, which is most days, I’ll check out an ebook to read at my computer while I’m on desk duty. The other day, I noticed that Shelby Mahurin’s Serpent & Dove had expired. Which was weird, because I’d never finished it—in fact, I think I only got about a third of the way through it.  I don’t just not finish books. I can think of only two instances in my entire life where I deliberately chose to not finish a book (maybe I should talk about those sometime, because yikes  they were bad). If I get too busy for a book I’m in the middle of, I might set it aside, assuring myself that I’ll get around to it one day. But I don’t just not finish books. But you know what else I don’t do? Pick up those half-read books again. I mean, sometimes I do. If I really am just way too busy for a novel but I was genuinely enjoying it, then yeah, I’ll probably pick it up again. Reading is pretty high on my priority list, though; it’s rare that ...

(minor spoilers) The Grace Year is probably the best YA novel I’ve read since Sharon Cameron’s The Forgetting , with a solid cast of sympathetic characters and a truly engrossing plot. When they’re around sixteen years old, the girls of Garner County must spend a titular “grace year” living together in the middle of the woods, during which they expunge themselves of all of their magic. Because this magic is sinful: it could prevent them from fully submitting to their proper roles as wives or workers; it causes upstanding men to lust after them. And it will only grow more dangerous as they enter into adulthood if they don’t fully rid themselves of it. But no one knows what happens during the grace year. Women are forbidden to speak of it, if they survive it. All Tierney James knows for sure is that many women do not survive, and those that come home are forever scarred by whatever happened to them, both physically and mentally. Most girls dream of being selected to enter into marriage ...