Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera
Publisher: Celadon Books
Publication date: March 5, 2024
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
After Lucy is found wandering the streets, covered in her best friend Savvy’s blood, everyone thinks she is a murderer. Lucy and Savvy were the golden girls of their small Texas town: pretty, smart, and enviable. Lucy married a dream guy with a big ring and an even bigger new home. Savvy was the social butterfly loved by all, and if you believe the rumors, especially popular with the men in town. It’s been years since that horrible night, a night Lucy can’t remember anything about, and she has since moved to LA and started a new life.
But now the phenomenally huge hit true crime podcast “Listen for the Lie,” and its too-good looking host Ben Owens, have decided to investigate Savvy’s murder for the show’s second season. Lucy is forced to return to the place she vowed never to set foot in again to solve her friend’s murder, even if she is the one that did it.
The truth is out there, if we just listen.
Lucy has lived in California for the past five years. She left her hometown after her best friend Savvy was murdered. On that night, Lucy was found wandering the streets, covered in Savvy’s blood. The town assumes she is the murderer but unfortunately, Lucy can’t remember anything about that night.
Ben Owens, a true crime podcaster, decides to investigate Savvy’s murder. Lucy’s grandma convinces her to come back to town under the guise that she’s having a birthday party for herself. Once Lucy gets back to town, she quickly figures out the real reason her grandma wanted her to come back is that Ben is also in town. Grandma wants Lucy to help him prove that she didn’t do it.
When this book first came out last year, there was a lot of hype around it. I read it back then and thought it was okay but not amazing. Probably because the hype had gotten my expectations too high. My friends on BookTok said that the audiobook was better, so I gave it a listen. I agree that it was mostly better on audio. The book has excerpts from Ben’s podcast throughout and for the audiobook, they are recorded as if you are listening to a real podcast. That part was really well done. However, Lucy has voices in her head, probably due to the brain injury she suffered the night of Savvy’s murder. The narrator uses a really annoying voice for them that was like fingernails on a chalkboard in my ear.
Overall, I enjoyed this book more on audiobook. It raised it up from athree-and-a-half-star book to a four-star book. Having some distance from the hype helped raise my rating as well. Recommended – as an audiobook.
June 3rd, 2025 in
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A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy by Tia Levings
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Publication date: August 6, 2024
My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
Recruited into the fundamentalist Quiverfull movement as a young wife, Tia Levings learned that being a good Christian meant following a list of additional life principles––a series of secret, special rules to obey. Being a godly and submissive wife in Christian Patriarchy included strict discipline, isolation, and an alternative lifestyle that appeared wholesome to outsiders. Women were to be silent, “keepers of the home.”
Tia knew that to their neighbors her family was strange, but she also couldn’t risk exposing their secret lifestyle to police, doctors, teachers, or anyone outside of their church. Christians were called in scripture to be “in the world, not of it.” So, she hid in plain sight as years of abuse and pain followed. When Tia realized she was the only one who could protect her children from becoming the next generation of patriarchal men and submissive women, she began to resist and question how they lived. But in the patriarchy, a woman with opinions is in danger, and eventually, Tia faced an urgent and extreme choice: stay and face dire consequences, or flee with her children.
Told in a beautiful, honest, and sometimes harrowing voice, A Well-Trained Wife is an unforgettable and timely memoir about a woman’s race to save herself and her family and details the ways that extreme views can manifest in a marriage.
Tia grew up in a conservative mega church, where she met her husband, Allen. She married him right out of high school. Soon after they wed, he joined an even more conservative patriarchal Christian movement that was all about wives submitting to their husbands. It was part of the quiverfull movement that the Duggars are also a part of, although it wasn’t the same church as them. The idea is to have a “quiverfull” of children to be God’s soldiers and hopefully eventually outnumber all of the sinners in the world.
Tia’s church also believed in the Goddred method of raising children to be obedient. That included “blanket training” that starts when the child is just a baby. They are punished every time they try to roll or crawl off their blanket on the floor so that eventually, they will stay on the blanket. (Michelle Duggar also promotes this method of teaching children to obey.)
Tia’s husband and the church itself became worse and worse over time. The leadership openly condoned and encouraged husbands to spank their wives to get them to obey. Her husband was more than happy to follow this protocol.
Something in Tia told her that this was not right. She never blanket trained her infants and she went against the advice of the other mothers in the church who believed babies would become spoiled if you picked them up and/or fed them whenever they cried.
Eventually, Tia began processing her growing disillusionment with the church through blogging and connecting with other women in her situation through a message board called Trapdoor. Even so, it took her years to work up the courage to take her children and leave. And even more years to process her religious trauma.
I enjoy books about cults, and I believe that religious fundamentalism is basically a cult. It’s fascinating to me how many women in Tia’s circle believed whole heartedly that their husbands should control them and they should submit blindly to them. And they mentored Tia (or at least tried to) to be the same way as them. They are already living in the way the project 2025 proponents want everyone in the country to live.
Tia is a strong woman and I’m glad to have read her journey out of religious patriarchy. She is featured in the Amazon documentary Shiny Happy People, which I hope to watch soon to learn even more about her and her former community.
Lies She Told by Cate Holahan
Publisher: Crooked Lane Books
Publication date : July 10, 2018
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
Liza Cole, a once-successful novelist whose career has seen better days, has one month to write the thriller that could land her back on the bestseller list. Meanwhile, she’s struggling to start a family, but her husband is distracted by the disappearance of his best friend, Nick. As stresses weigh her down in her professional and personal lives, Liza escapes into writing the chilling exploits of her latest heroine, Beth.
Beth, a new mother, suspects her husband is cheating on her while she’s home caring for their newborn. Angry and betrayed, she aims to catch him in the act and make him pay for shattering the illusion of their perfect life. But before she realizes what she’s doing, she’s tossing the body of her husband’s mistress into the East River.
Then, the lines between Liza’s fiction and her reality eerily blur. Nick’s body is dragged from the East River, and Liza’s husband is arrested for his murder. Before her deadline is up, Liza will have to face up to the truths about the people around her, including her own. If she doesn’t, the end of her heroine’s story could be the end of her own.
Liza is a romantic thriller author who’s in a bit of a writer’s slump. When her editor presses her for an outline of her latest book, she balks. She doesn’t like outlines. Instead, she tells him she will deliver the finished book in one month.
At the same time, her husband has grown distant after his best friend went missing a month ago. Liza has been undergoing fertility treatments that are not working and having an absent husband is not helping on that front.
Lies She Told alternates between Liza’s real life and the novel she’s writing about Beth, a new mom whose husband may be cheating on her.
This book started out slowly. At one point, I was wondering why it’s classified as a thriller – there were no thrills. It finally picked up in the last few chapters and then it was twist after twist.
I picked up this book when I was in a bit of a reading slump and I was hoping for an unputdownable thriller. I enjoyed this book, but it wasn’t as much of a page turner as I was hoping it would be.
Flirting with Disaster by Naina Kumar
Publisher: Dell
Publication Date: January 14, 2025
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
It’s been years since Meena separated from her husband, Nikhil . . . years since they first laid eyes on each other in their home state of Texas, years since they spontaneously wed in Las Vegas and she felt true happiness. Now a high-powered lawyer on Capitol Hill and ready to move on (at least, she thinks so) with another successful lawyer, Shake, Meena has returned to Texas. This time, finally to obtain a divorce.
But there’s one thing Meena didn’t account for: a hurricane forming in the Gulf, veering right toward them and giving them no choice but to hunker down in the home they had built together. Suddenly, she finds herself trapped amid gale-force winds and pelting rain with the man she once loved.
As they spend more time together, Meena begins to remember everything that drew her to Nikhil: his small-town charm, his thoughtful nature . . . his absurdly good looks. But being with Shake makes sense to her. He’s steady, ambitious, and wants exactly what she wants. So she’ll stick to her plan, come hell or high water. But will her windswept heart make the right choice, once the eye passes over and the storm settles?
With sharp observations about second chances at love, ambition and Indian American identity, and with characters who share an undeniable chemistry, Flirting with Disaster is a modern romance with the sensibility of a classic.
Meena and Nikhil got married on a whim in Las Vegas after dating just a short time. Within a year they were separated but never legally divorced. Flash forward six years and Meena wants to make the divorce official. Her current boyfriend has given her an ultimatum – make the divorce legal or they’re through.
Meena lives in Washington DC and Nikhil lives in Texas. Meena’s been trying to get him to sign the divorce papers long distance with no luck. Finally, she decides to go to Texas and make him sign them. She arrives as, unbeknownst to her, a hurricane is brewing. It’s too late to evacuate – all flights out have been canceled, and all the hotels are booked. Meena is forced to hunker down with Nikhil. Will being trapped with Nikhil for several days cause them to rekindle their romance?
Flirting with Disaster wasn’t quite as sweet as Kumar’s first book, Say You’ll Be Mine. I loved that book though – it would be hard to top. However, I did enjoy Flirting with Disaster. It would be a good beach read with summer coming up. Recommended.
April 26th, 2025 in
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Bride by Ali Hazelwood
Publisher: Berkley
Publication Date: February 6, 2024
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
A dangerous alliance between a Vampyre bride and an Alpha Werewolf becomes a love deep enough to sink your teeth into in this new paranormal romance from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love, Theoretically and The Love Hypothesis.
Misery Lark, the only daughter of the most powerful Vampyre councilman of the Southwest, is an outcast—again. Her days of living in anonymity among the Humans are over: she has been called upon to uphold a historic peacekeeping alliance between the Vampyres and their mortal enemies, the Weres, and she sees little choice but to surrender herself in the exchange—again…
Weres are ruthless and unpredictable, and their Alpha, Lowe Moreland, is no exception. He rules his pack with absolute authority, but not without justice. And, unlike the Vampyre Council, not without feeling. It’s clear from the way he tracks Misery’s every movement that he doesn’t trust her. If only he knew how right he was….
Because Misery has her own reasons to agree to this marriage of convenience, reasons that have nothing to do with politics or alliances, and everything to do with the only thing she’s ever cared about. And she is willing to do whatever it takes to get back what’s hers, even if it means a life alone in Were territory…alone with the wolf.
Bride is Ali Hazelwood’s first foray into paranormal romance. I was skeptical going in – not because I didn’t think she’d do a good job, but because I haven’t read paranormal romance in so long, I didn’t know if I would still like it. Turns out, I do!
Bride follows Misery, a Vampyre who has been passing as human and living in the human world for the past few years. Her father, who is head of the Vampyre council, calls her home and tells her she has to marry Lowe Moreland, the Alpha Were. She will live with him in Were territory and another Were will marry a Vampyre and live in Vampyre territory. This arrangement is supposed to ensure peace between the two factions, as a betrayal by the Vampyres would get Misery killed and vice versa. It’s mutually assured destruction.
Of course, an attraction forms between Misery and Lowe but it’s complicated. Their marriage was supposed to be all business – Weres and Vampyres do not get romantically involved. And how would the physical aspect even work? The interspecies intimacy was a little weird but still very spicy and well-written.
I thoroughly enjoyed Bride. Misery has the same dry sense of humor that her female protagonists are known for, and I loved the banter between her and Lowe. Lowe has a younger sister that Misery, to her chagrin, grows to like, and their relationship is cute.
A sequel to Bride called Mate is due out in October. I can’t wait! Highly recommended.
Other books by Ali Hazelwood I’ve reviewed:
The Love Hypothosis
Love, Theoretically
Check & Mate
Not In Love
April 23rd, 2025 in
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The House of My Mother: A Daughter’s Quest for Freedom by Shari Franke
Publisher: Gallery Books
Publication Date: January 7, 2025
My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
Shari Franke’s childhood was a constant battle for survival. Her mother, Ruby Franke, enforced a severe moral code while maintaining a façade of a picture-perfect family for their wildly popular YouTube channel 8 Passengers, which documented the day-to-day life of raising six children for a staggering 2.5 million subscribers. But a darker truth lurked beneath the surface—Ruby’s wholesome online persona masked a more tyrannical parenting style than anyone could have imagined.
As the family’s YouTube notoriety grew, so too did Ruby’s delusions of righteousness. Fueled by the sadistic influence of relationship coach Jodi Hildebrandt, together they implemented an inhumane and merciless disciplinary regime.
Ruby and Jodi were arrested in Utah in 2023 on multiple charges of aggravated child abuse. On that fateful day, Shari shared a photo online of a police car outside their home. Her caption had one word: “Finally.”
For the first time, Shari will reveal the disturbing truth behind 8 Passengers and her family’s devastating involvement with Jodi Hildebrandt’s cultish life coaching program, “ConneXions.” No stone is left unturned as Shari exposes the perils of influencer culture and shares for the first time her battle for truth and survival in the face of her mother’s cruelty.
Shari Franke is the oldest child of Ruby Franke, a mommy vlogger whose YouTube channel 8 Passengers had more than two million followers at its peak.
Ruby, who has six kids in total, filmed almost every moment of their lives for content, editing videos in such a way to make her look like a great mom with a happy family. In reality, she was a cold and distant mom who emotionally abused her children.
Once Ruby met Jodi Hildebrant, things became even worse. Jodi was basically a one-woman cult, touting herself as an expert family counselor, even though her license had been revoked. She charged her clients exorbitant fees for her services and lived in a mansion complete with a safe room.
Ruby soon bought Jodi’s bs hook, line and sinker. Her children’s lives became hell, to the point that her YouTube fans were concerned. She filmed a video about not bringing her small child her forgotten lunch at school and telling the teacher not to give her any food at all so that she would be hungry. In another one, her oldest son Chad let it slip that he was forced to sleep on a bean bag for seven months.
Eventually, she and Jodi started torturing her two youngest children. They were found out when one of them escaped from being chained up in Jodi’s house.
Shari is fiercely protective of her four youngest siblings and does not name them or go into any specifics about what the police found when they raided Jodi’s house. All of that it easily found on the Internet, and I think Shari assumes that anyone reading this book has heard the story on the news and has the details. She does name Chad because he is over 18 now.
Because of her respect her four youngest sibling privacy, this book is entirely her story. She went to college around the time Ruby met Jodi, but she was still severely emotionally abused by Ruby as a child and then later by both Ruby and Jodi. Her father did not actually abuse her, but he toed the line and didn’t go against Ruby or Jodi to protect his children.
I went down a Ruby Franke rabbit hole while I was reading this book. If you’re interested in learning more after reading this book – or before for that matter, you can find the 911 call from when her son escaped, as well as body cam footage of Ruby’s arrest. It’s chilling, she shows no emotion at all. There are also several documentaries about Ruby, Jodi and the Franke family.
This was a hard book to read but it was very well-done. Shari is unflinchingly honest about her life and what she shares. I chose this book because I wanted more insight into how a popular mommy vlogger could turn into a monster and my curiosity was satisfied.
Recommended.
April 9th, 2025 in
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Barely Visible: Mothering a Son Through His Misunderstood Autism by Kathleen Somers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Kathleen Somers’s son Jack was diagnosed with Asperger’s in elementary school. That was almost twenty years ago – Asperger’s is no longer a diagnosis. It’s been rolled into the autism classification now. Someone who would have been diagnosed with Asperger’s back them is now would be called high functioning or level one autistic.
Somers is unflinchingly honest about her journey with her son, who’s in his 20s now. She and her ex-husband were in denial about Jack’s situation for quite a long time. It seems that in some ways she’s still a little in denial. In the epilogue she mentions that at some level she hopes that Jack outgrows his autism even though she knows that this is impossible.
I think that this book would be helpful for someone whose child was recently diagnosed with autism and that is still in the denial/anger phase. Barely Visible is somewhat of a cautionary tale of what not to do at that stage. I think Sommers would agree. I think this book would also be helpful for people who have younger autistic children, even if they’ve had the diagnosis for a while – like me. My autistic son is five years-old and he was diagnosed level one at three. I know that even though we’ve adjusted fairly well for now, middle school and high school will present new challenges. I got an idea of what those years could look like from reading Jack’s story.
I also think that people who are not a parent of an autistic child but have one in their lives could benefit from this book. It will help them see that autistic behavior is not a disciple problem. Our kids don’t act the way they do because they are spoiled or we’re not hard enough on them.
If your life is affected by autism, this is a book worth checking out.
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April 4th, 2025 in
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And They Had a Great Fall: A Novel by Shelby Saville
Publisher: She Writes Press
Publication Date: March 11, 2025)
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
If Jake Laurent is the “human equivalent of Friday,” Kat Green is “Monday.” Nevertheless, the two shared a secret (if casual) affair during the pandemic, and now, almost exactly one year later, they’ve reunited in Copenhagen, the “city of fairy tales.” Only neither one of them is living a fairy tale.
Jake is a young actor who’s cracking under the public pressure that comes with rising celebrity. Kat is a single mother at the top of her career who believes she’s holding it all together but is barely living. Each one is a simple escape for the other—until the security Kat has worked so hard to build for her tiny family comes under threat, and Jake has to decide if he can keep Kat a secret even if it’s at the expense of his own fame.
And They Had a Great Fall is the story of two people who are going through the motions in life—until they finally look inside themselves to figure out what it takes to find a happily ever after.
Jack and Kat hooked up during the pandemic when they were the part of the same pod. Kat lives next door to Jake’s parents and he came home to shelter in place with them. Jack is a famous 25 year-old movie star and Kat is a high-powered corporate executive and a single mom in her thirties. More than a year after they last spoke, Jack calls Kat from Copenhagen, where he is shooting on location. Things are not going well with the movie and he wants Kat to come there and help him cope with the pressure. She happens to have work for her corporation she could attend to while she’s there, so she joins him. She also needs help, although she doesn’t realize it. She’s still grieving the loss of her husband, who died of cancer five years ago when their daughter was a baby.
Jake and Kat rekindle their affair once Kat arrives in Copenhagen, but Kat insists that they keep their relationship a secret. She fears that if she and Jake go public, the leadership at her company will see her as a frivolous woman for dating a movie star. She’s also worried about her daughter’s safety if she’s in the public eye. Is it possible to keep things a secret and what will they do if they can’t?
And They Had a Great Fall deals with some serious issues in an authentic way. I liked that it wasn’t afraid to deviate a bit from the traditional romance formula in order to tackle those issues. This book would be a great beach read this summer.
(I received a complimentary copy of this book for review.)
Good Time Girl by Heather Gay
Publisher: Gallery Books
Publication Date: December 3, 2024
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
In the “confident debut” (The Daily Beast) Bad Mormon, Heather Gay pulled back the veil on her orthodox adolescence and marriage in the Mormon Church, and the painful process of leaving it all behind. Becoming a successful business owner and reality TV star gave the single mom of three a second lease on life. After years of living in an insular bubble, Heather emerged bright-eyed, eager to take on the world…no matter how ill-equipped her upbringing might have left her.
Now, in this provocative and laugh-out-loud funny follow-up, the mother of three proves that she isn’t just a Bad Mormon—she’s also a Good Time Girl.
With her “thoughtful, smart, and funny” (Kirkus Reviews) writing, Heather recounts the humorous trysts, mishaps, and serendipitous success she’s found as a life-long reveler in all things indulgent. From illicit high school trips to Tijuana and awkward dates set up by her overzealous costars, Good Time Girl is a charming and intimate meditation on community, love, independence, womanhood, and—most importantly—second chances.
Good Time Girl is Heather Gay’s follow up to her first book, Bad Mormon. I haven’t read that book yet so I can’t say how they compare. Heather is a cast member on The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. In the first season, her castmate Lisa Barlow told some of the other women that she heard Heather was known as a “good-time girl” at BYU. At the time, Heather was pissed but she reclaimed the label for her book.
Good Time Girl is a collection of times that Heather was a good time girl, which is usually ironic. She thought at the time she was being wild because of her strict Mormon upbringing but what she did was not that bad. Or in some cases it was really embarrassing. I had major secondhand embarrassment when she tried to hit on her college professor.
The last section of the book is about the fourth season of RHOSL and Monica. If you’ve watched the show, you know who I’m talking about. If you haven’t, you’re probably not going to read this book anyway! Heather goes through a way more thorough.
timeline of Monica’s craziness than what was shown on TV. Monica is basically a sociopath who stalked Jen for years, to the point of installing secret security cameras in Jen’s house to spy on her. She was obsessed with getting cast on RHOSL.
The book as a whole is good, but it is a MUST for fans of RHOSL, simply for the section on what happened with Monica. You will not be disappointed!
Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication Date: March 4, 2025
My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
“The farmer is dead. He is dead, and all anyone wants to know is who killed him.”
Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, but their relationship relies on the past staying buried. But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager—the man who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident.
As Beth is pulled back into Gabriel’s life, tensions around the village rise and dangerous secrets and jealousies from the past resurface, this time with deadly consequences. Beth is forced to make a choice between the woman she once was, and the woman she has become.
A sweeping love story with the pace and twists of a thriller, Broken Country is a novel of simmering passion, impossible choices, and explosive consequences that toggles between the past and present to explore the far-reaching legacy of first love.
Beth, a teenager who lives in a small country town, is taking a walk when Gabriel sees her and tells her to get off his land. Even though Gabriel, a rich boy home from college, is extremely rude to Beth at that first meeting, they soon start up a passionate love affair. They try to keep it going after Gabriel goes back to college but eventually Gabriel breaks Beth’s heart.
Fast forward to present day, which in Broken Country is the late 1960s, and Beth, her husband Frank and her brother in-law Jimmy are tending sheep when a dog runs up and starts killing the lambs. Jimmy shoots and kills the dog to save anymore sheep from being slaughtered. The dog belongs to Gabriel, who is back in town after several years away. This shot starts a series of events that no one could have imagined.
I loved Broken Country even though I didn’t necessarily love Beth all the time. She made some very bad decisions. At the beginning of the book, I thought I knew where the story was going but I was totally surprised and completely wrong. I don’t want to say anymore and risk spoiling it. Broken Country kept me up until 3am because once I got to a certain point, I couldn’t tear myself away from it.
Highly recommended.
(I received a complimentary copy of this book for review.)
March 27th, 2025 in
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