robalir
Reading broad reading broadly. Public servant on mat leave, making the most of naptime to burn through the TBR. She/her đ¨đŚ
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1h
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
David Grann
34%
3
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1h
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2h
The Jasmine Throne (The Burning Kingdoms, #1)
Tasha Suri
Author of Empire of Sand and Realm of Ash Tasha Suri's The Jasmine Throne, beginning a new trilogy set in a world inspired by the history and epics of India, in which a captive princess and a maidservant in possession of forbidden magic become unlikely allies on a dark journey to save their empire from the princess's traitor brother.
Imprisoned by her dictator brother, Malini spends her days in isolation in the Hirana: an ancient temple that was once the source of the powerful, magical deathless waters â but is now little more than a decaying ruin.
Priya is a maidservant, one among several who make the treacherous journey to the top of the Hirana every night to clean Maliniâs chambers. She is happy to be an anonymous drudge, so long as it keeps anyone from guessing the dangerous secret she hides.
But when Malini accidentally bears witness to Priyaâs true nature, their destinies become irrevocably tangled. One is a vengeful princess seeking to depose her brother from his throne. The other is a priestess seeking to find her family. Together, they will change the fate of an empire.
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2h
Metal from Heaven
August Clarke
For fans ofâŻThe Princess BrideâŻand Gideon the a bloodyâŻlesbian revenge tale and political fantasy setâŻin a glittering world transformed by industrial change â andâŻsimmering class warfare. Ichorite is progress. More durable and malleable than steel, ichorite is the lifeblood of a dawning industrial revolution. Yann I. Chauncey owns the sole means of manufacturing this valuable metal, but his workers, who risk their health and safety daily, are on strike. They demand Chauncey research the hallucinatory illness befalling them, a condition they call âbeing lustertouched.â Marney Honeycutt, a lustertouched child worker, stands proud at the picket line with her best friend and family. Thatâs when Chauncey sends in the guns. Only Marney survives the massacre. She vows bloody vengeance. A decade later, Marney is the nationâs most notorious highwayman, and Chaunceyâs daughter seeks an opportune marriage. Marneyâs rage and the ghosts of her past will drive her to masquerade as an aristocrat, outmaneuver powerful suitors, and win the heart of his daughter, so Marney can finally corner Chauncey and satisfy her need for revenge. But war ferments in the north, and deeper grudges are surfacing. . . H. A. Clarkeâs adult fantasy debut, writing as August Clarke, Metal from Heaven is a punk-rock murder ballad tackling labor issues and radical empowerment against the relentless grind of capitalism.
1
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3h
When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decadeâs worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithiâs transformation from a naĂŻve medical student âpossessed,â as he wrote, âby the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful lifeâ into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.
What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.
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5h
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6h
robalir commented on robalir's update
6h
robalir started reading...
7h
They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom
Ahed Tamimi
A Palestinian activist jailed at sixteen after a confrontation with Israeli soldiers illuminates the daily struggles of life under occupation in this moving, deeply personal memoir.
âWhat would you do if you grew up seeing your home repeatedly raided? Your parents arrested? Your mother shot? Your uncle killed? Try, for just a moment, to imagine that this was your life. How would you want the world to react?â
Ahed Tamimi is a world-renowned Palestinian activist, born and raised in the small West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, which became a center of the resistance to Israeli occupation when an illegal, Jewish-only settlement blocked off its community spring. Tamimi came of age participating in nonviolent demonstrations against this action and the occupation at large. Her global renown reached an apex in December 2017, when, at sixteen years old, she was filmed slapping an Israeli soldier who refused to leave her front yard. The video went viral, and Tamimi was arrested.
But this is not just a story of activism or imprisonment. It is the human-scale story of an occupation that has riveted the world and shaped global politics, from a girl who grew up in the middle of it . Tamimiâs father was born in 1967, the year that Israel began its occupation of the West Bank and he grew up immersed in the resistance movement. One of Tamimiâs earliest memories is visiting him in prison, poking her toddler fingers through the fence to touch his hand. She herself would spend her seventeenth birthday behind bars. Living through this greatest test and heightened attacks on her village, Tamimi felt her resolve only deepen, in tension with her attempts to live the normal life of a daughter, sibling, friend, and student.
An essential addition to an important conversation, They Called Me a Lioness shows us what is at stake in this struggle and offers a fresh vision for resistance. With their unflinching, riveting storytelling, Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri shine a light on the humanity not just in occupied Palestine but also in the unsung lives of people struggling for freedom around the world.
20
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robalir started reading...
7h
They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom
Ahed Tamimi
A Palestinian activist jailed at sixteen after a confrontation with Israeli soldiers illuminates the daily struggles of life under occupation in this moving, deeply personal memoir.
âWhat would you do if you grew up seeing your home repeatedly raided? Your parents arrested? Your mother shot? Your uncle killed? Try, for just a moment, to imagine that this was your life. How would you want the world to react?â
Ahed Tamimi is a world-renowned Palestinian activist, born and raised in the small West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, which became a center of the resistance to Israeli occupation when an illegal, Jewish-only settlement blocked off its community spring. Tamimi came of age participating in nonviolent demonstrations against this action and the occupation at large. Her global renown reached an apex in December 2017, when, at sixteen years old, she was filmed slapping an Israeli soldier who refused to leave her front yard. The video went viral, and Tamimi was arrested.
But this is not just a story of activism or imprisonment. It is the human-scale story of an occupation that has riveted the world and shaped global politics, from a girl who grew up in the middle of it . Tamimiâs father was born in 1967, the year that Israel began its occupation of the West Bank and he grew up immersed in the resistance movement. One of Tamimiâs earliest memories is visiting him in prison, poking her toddler fingers through the fence to touch his hand. She herself would spend her seventeenth birthday behind bars. Living through this greatest test and heightened attacks on her village, Tamimi felt her resolve only deepen, in tension with her attempts to live the normal life of a daughter, sibling, friend, and student.
An essential addition to an important conversation, They Called Me a Lioness shows us what is at stake in this struggle and offers a fresh vision for resistance. With their unflinching, riveting storytelling, Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri shine a light on the humanity not just in occupied Palestine but also in the unsung lives of people struggling for freedom around the world.
20
3Reply
robalir finished a book
7h
An Unkindness of Ghosts
Rivers Solomon
Odd-mannered, obsessive, withdrawn, Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. She's used to the names; she only wishes there was more truth to them. If she were truly a monster, as they accuse, she'd be powerful enough to tear down the walls around her until nothing remained of her world, save for stories told around the cookfire.
Aster lives in the low-deck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations, the Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way, the ship's leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster, who they consider to be less than human.
When the autopsy of Matilda's sovereign reveals a surprising link between his death and her mother's suicide some quarter-century before, Aster retraces her mother's footsteps. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer and sowing the seeds of civil war, Aster learns there may be a way off the ship if she's willing to fight for it.
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robalir wrote a review...
16h
Incredible storytelling and character development. I loved the central message of humour and language being life-saving tools.
10
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robalir wrote a review...
16h
While Horowitzâs ability to write a novel within a novel remains impressive, a growing list of questionable details has ok boomerâd me out of this series Iâm afraid. Also I guessed one of the murderers in this one and I donât think itâs because Iâm getting smarter.
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robalir started reading...
1d
Half His Age
Jennette McCurdy
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Iâm Glad My Mom Died comes a sad, funny, thrilling novel about sex, consumerism, class, desire, loneliness, the internet, rage, intimacy, power, and the (oftentimes misguided) lengths weâll go to in order to get what we want. Waldo is ravenous. Horny. Blunt. Naive. Wise. Impulsive. Lonely. Angry. Forceful. Hurting. Perceptive. Endlessly wanting. And the thing she wants most of Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher with the wife and the kid and the mortgage and the bills, with the dead dreams and the atrophied looks and the growing paunch. She doesnât know why she wants him. Is it his passion? His life experience? The fact that he knows books and films and things that she doesnât? Or is it purer than that, rooted in their unlikely connection, their kindred spirits, the similar filter with which they each take in the world around them? Or, perhaps, itâs just enough that he sees her when no one else does. Startlingly perceptive, mordantly funny, and keenly poignant, Half His Age is a rich character study of a yearning seventeen-year-old who disregards all obstaclesâor attempts to overcome themâin her effort to be seen, to be desired, to be loved.
4
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robalir finished a book
1d
James
Percival Everett
A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view.
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
While many narrative set pieces of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the riverâs banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and DauphinâŚ), Jimâs agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.
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robalir commented on EmpyreanEmery's update
1d
