Hey! I know I just did my February favourites a couple weeks ago, but I thought I would get a good start for this month and get it done early. So here it is, my favourites for March of this year.
In no particular order,
The universe ended, but humanity survived. And for years, the passengers and crew of the vessel Orpheus found the endless void between realities to be a surprisingly peaceful home.
Then they found a body; bloodied, brutalized, and surrounded by inscrutable runes. As Security Director Deva Karrell investigates the Orpheus’ first murder, she’ll come face to face with a horror from beyond the confines of time itself…
Collects INFINITE DARK #1-4
2. Shifting Horizons (The Denounced Series #2) by S.J. Sherwood
In a future divided into Secular and Non-Secular Quadrants, a crime punishable by death is to cross Quandrants and become a Dedounced.
Pod Fifteen has escaped Ilse’s cruel regime only to fall intothe hands of a strange Nomadic Tribe. Their charismatic leader, Omar, begins to fill Ned’s mind with ideas about his destiny. A possible future that puts the Pod’s hard-fought friendships to the test, cuts loyalties to the bone and further exposes character flaws. Nobody is sure who they can trust and what they should do next, but Ned is convinced he must travel home if he has any chance of fulfilling his truth and changing the course of history.
3. The Manic Pixie Dream Boy Improvement Project by Lenore Appelhans
Riley lives in TropeTown, where everyone plays stock roles in novels. Riley, a Manic Pixie Dream Boy, is sent to group therapy after going off-script. Riley knows that breaking the rules again could get him terminated, yet he feels there must be more to life than recycling the same clichés for readers’ entertainment. Then he meets Zelda, a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (Geek Chic subtype), and falls head over heels in love. Zelda’s in therapy too, along with several other Manic Pixies. But TropeTown has a dark secret, and if Riley and his fellow Manic Pixies don’t get to the bottom of it, they may all be terminated.
4. Beautiful Bad by Annie Ward
In the most explosive and twisted psychological thriller since The Woman in the Window, a beautiful marriage turns beautifully bad.
Things that make me scared: When Charlie cries. Hospitals and lakes. When Ian drinks vodka in the basement. ISIS. When Ian gets angry… That something is really, really wrong with me.
Maddie and Ian’s romance began with a chance encounter at a party overseas; he was serving in the British army and she was a travel writer visiting her best friend, Jo. Now almost two decades later, married with a beautiful son, Charlie, they are living the perfect suburban life in Middle America. But when a camping accident leaves Maddie badly scarred, she begins attending writing therapy, where she gradually reveals her fears about Ian’s PTSD; her concerns for the safety of their young son, Charlie; and the couple’s tangled and tumultuous past with Jo.
From the Balkans to England, Iraq to Manhattan, and finally to an ordinary family home in Kansas, sixteen years of love and fear, adventure and suspicion culminate in The Day of the Killing, when a frantic 911 call summons the police to the scene of a shocking crime.
and last but not least,
5. War Flower: My Life after Iraq by Brooke King
Brooke King has been asked over and over what it’s like to be a woman in combat, but she knows her answer is not what the public wants to hear. The answers people seek lie in the graphic details of war—the sex, death, violence, and reality of it all as she experienced it. In her riveting memoir War Flower, King breaks her silence and reveals the truth about her experience as a soldier in Iraq. Find out what happens when the sex turns into secret affairs, the violence is turned up to eleven, and how King’s feelings for a country she knew nothing about as a nineteen-year-old become more disturbing to her as a thirty-year-old mother writing it all down before her memories fade into oblivion.
The story of a girl who went to war and returned home a woman, War Flower gathers the enduring remembrances of a soldier coming to grips with post-traumatic stress disorder. As King recalls her time in Iraq, she reflects on what violence does to a woman and how the psychic wounds of combat are unwittingly passed down from mother to children. War Flower is ultimately a profound meditation on what it means to have been a woman in a war zone and an unsettling exposé on war and its lingering aftershocks. For veterans such as King, the toughest lesson of service is that in the mind, some wars never end—even after you come home.
And that’s it! Another month of books have come and gone, and I can’t wait to see what my favourites are this month. Have you read any of these books? What do you think of them even if you haven’t? Let me know below!
radioactive book reviews 