skylar

lover of off-kilter, sentimental stories 💕

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The Yellow House

Sarah M. Broom

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Tinkers

Paul Harding

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Tinkers

Paul Harding

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skylar TBR'd a book

Razorblade Tears

S.A. Cosby

An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here. A Black father. A white father. Two murdered sons. A quest for vengeance.Ike Randolph has been out of jail for fifteen years, with not so much as a speeding ticket in all that time. But a Black man with cops at the door knows to be afraid.The last thing he expects to hear is that his son Isiah has been murdered, along with Isiah’s white husband, Derek. Ike had never fully accepted his son but is devastated by his loss. Derek’s father Buddy Lee was almost as ashamed of Derek for being gay as Derek was ashamed his father was a criminal. Buddy Lee still has contacts in the underworld, though, and he wants to know who killed his boy.Ike and Buddy Lee, two ex-cons with little else in common other than a criminal past and a love for their dead sons, band together in their desperate desire for revenge. In their quest to do better for their sons in death than they did in life, hardened men Ike and Buddy Lee will confront their own prejudices about their sons and each other, as they rain down vengeance upon those who hurt their boys.Provocative and fast-paced, S.A. Cosby's Razorblade Tears is a story of bloody retribution, heartfelt change - and maybe even redemption.

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12h

Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark - Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2025

skylar

Alternate cover

I will just note - I love this cover from the FSG version of this book so much. This photo perfectly captures Muriel Spark's aura. Electric Spark

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skylar

Mr. Collins Hate Club

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Post from the Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark - Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2025 forum

skylar

Alternate cover

I will just note - I love this cover from the FSG version of this book so much. This photo perfectly captures Muriel Spark's aura. Electric Spark

skylar wrote a review...

skylar

Jan 27, 2026

3.5

Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

✍️

One line summary: Of course this book is about Muriel Spark, but it's also about a woman who will have her story told, even if that story isn't fully true.

This was a thorough, insightful book about how Muriel Spark came to be a novelist, including explorations of the people and society around her. My main gripe is that after a while, I really started feeling each and every page go by and found myself wanting to skim. Regardless, I can appreciate Frances Wilson's research and voice in this book.

skylar finished a book

Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark - Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2025

Frances Wilson

'Absolutely mesmerising. I was possessed by this book in the same way that I suspect its author was possessed by Spark. It still hasn't put me down' Spectator'Unputdownable' Financial Times'Joyously, brilliantly intelligent. In Wilson, Spark has met her true match' Anne EnrightFrom one of our leading biographers and critics comes an exhilarating, landmark new look at Muriel Spark. The word most commonly used to describe Muriel Spark is 'puzzling'. Spark was a puzzle, and so too are her books. She dealt in word games, tricks, and ciphers; her life was composed of weird accidents, strange coincidences and spooky events. Evelyn Waugh thought she was a saint, Bernard Levin said she was a witch, and she described herself as 'Muriel the Marvel with her X-ray eyes'. Following the clues, riddles, and instructions Spark planted for posterity in her biographies, fiction, autobiography and archives, Frances Wilson aims to crack her code. Electric Spark explores not the celebrated Dame Muriel but the apprentice mage discovering her powers. We return to her early years when everything was piled divorce, madness, murder, espionage, poverty, skulduggery, blackmail, love affairs, revenge, and a major religious conversion. If this sounds like a novel by Muriel Spark it is because the experiences of the 1940s and 1950s became, alchemically reduced, the material of her art.

skylar commented on nightswim's review of A Woman in the Polar Night

nightswim

Jan 27, 2026

4.0

Enjoyment: 4.0Quality: 4.0Characters: 4.0Plot: 4.0

🥶

🐻

❄️

A simple and beautiful story that follows a European woman spending a year with her husband in the Arctic. At first, it appears as if it will be a grim tale but with time, she comes to see the beauty of the land in all the ways that it exists.

skylar commented on cynthialwho's review of Sense and Sensibility

cynthialwho

Jan 27, 2026

3.0

Enjoyment: 3.0Quality: 3.5Characters: 3.0Plot: 3.5

To Miss JA: I love you, but this is not your finest outing.

skylar commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

bookishpancit

Book Recs: Complicated Mother-Daughter Relationships

I guess I’m in the mood for making myself suffer (lol, kidding. A little.), but does anyone have any good recommendations for books about complicated mother-daughter relationships (esp if mom’s an immigrant and daughter is first generation)? I’m open to fic and non-fic.

Thank you, friends!

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The Yellow House

Sarah M. Broom

In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant--the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah's father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah's birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae's thirteenth and most unruly child. A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America's most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the "Big Easy" of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.

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Annabel.111

My favourite quote (final chapter)

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Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark - Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2025

Frances Wilson

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Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark - Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2025

Frances Wilson

72%

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Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark - Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2025

Frances Wilson

72%

skylar commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

csdaley

All-in On Pagebound

Well, I guess I am all in on Pagebound now. I spent most of the last two days entering in all my TBR books that I have bought on Kindle over the last 10 years. I buy a massive amount of books when they go on sale. I have always considered it my retirement reading fund. Plus, I check out a lot of book from the library and have always felt it is important to continue to buy books and support the industry (just a me thing). I figure even if I DNF a bunch of them I bought them so cheap I will come out ahead if I had bought them at full price.

Now that I have them all organized in Pagebound I can’t leave. I am currently sitting on about 500 TBR books which I know seems like a lot but I have a goal to read 365 books my first year of retirement (which starts in 5 months). I normally read about 175 while working so I think I will be in the ball park which will pretty much wipe out my TBR assuming I DNF about 1 in 4.

I am super excited to have them organized. Now I can easily find books depending on the mood I am in. Plus, I broke my mysteries up by country setting so I can pop around the world.

If you have a TBR stack what is the number where it starts to feel overwhelming for you?

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skylar

Thoughts from 51% (Chapter 14)

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