Ash Reads Stuff

This week's Top Ten Tuesday , a weekly feature brought to you by The Broke and the Bookish is all about the beach. Kind of. Okay, technically the topic is beach reads, books you'd read on the beach, books about the beach? This list is a bit of a mash-up, so hold on tight. Some of these are great to read at the beach and some of them might be about the beach. Who really knows? We Were Liars About the beach, but also a good beach read.  And it's mysterious. (Also creepy.) The Lightning Thief Percy is the son of Poseidon and Poseidon is the god of the sea.  What more could you want?  This Sky Just take all of Autumn's books to the beach.  Unhooked Swoonworthy Pirates. Do it.  Graffiti Moon  This one! These kids. Sigh. To All the Boys I've Loved Before Much love.  Anna and the French Kiss I still smile when I think about St. Clair. My Life Next Door The book has so many delicious layers.  The D

A Court of Mist and Fury   by Sarah J. Maas Publication Date : May 3rd, 2016 Pages:  624 (hardcover)  Genre:  Fantasy My Goodreads Rating:  5 Stars Goodreads Synopsis: Feyre survived Amarantha's clutches to return to the Spring Court—but at a steep cost. Though she now has the powers of the High Fae, her heart remains human, and it can't forget the terrible deeds she performed to save Tamlin's people. Nor has Feyre forgotten her bargain with Rhysand, High Lord of the feared Night Court. As Feyre navigates its dark web of politics, passion, and dazzling power, a greater evil looms—and she might be key to stopping it. But only if she can harness her harrowing gifts, heal her fractured soul, and decide how she wishes to shape her future—and the future of a world cleaved in two. My Review:  Okay, Sarah. You got me again. Around this time last year I read A Court of Thorns and Roses (read my review here ) and completely fell in love with Sarah's writing,

Goldfish by Nat Luurtsema Publication Date: June 7, 2016 Pages: 241 (kindle) Genre: Young Adult  My Goodreads Rating: 3 Stars Goodreads Synopsis: I am Lou Brown: Social outcast, precocious failure, 5'10" and still growing. I was on the fast track to the Olympic superstardom. Now, I'm training boys too cool to talk to me. In a sport I just made up. In a fish tank. My life has quickly become very weird. Nat Luurtsema's YA debut is side-splittingly funny and painfully true to anyone who's just trying to figure out how they fit into the world. My Review:  Lou's description of her life pretty much sums up this book, to be honest. It was weird. It starts with Lou, a competitive swimmer, losing a race spectacularly and basically getting shunned by her whole team.  Lou is a fifteen-year-old girl who is a little strange to begin with. She lives with her divorced parents and her sister, a popular girl at school. Her best friend Hannah didn't s

Blackhearts  by Nicole Castroman Publication Date:  February 9, 2016 Pages: 384 (hardcover) Genre: Young Adult  My Goodreads Rating: 4 Stars Goodreads Synopsis: Blackbeard the pirate was known for striking fear in the hearts of the bravest of sailors. But once he was just a young man who dreamed of leaving his rigid life behind to chase adventure in faraway lands. Nothing could stop him—until he met the one girl who would change everything. Edward "Teach" Drummond, son of one of Bristol's richest merchants, has just returned from a year-long journey on the high seas to find his life in shambles. Betrothed to a girl he doesn’t love and sick of the high society he was born into, Teach dreams only of returning to the vast ocean he’d begun to call home. There's just one problem: convincing his father to let him leave and never come back. Following her parents' deaths, Anne Barrett is left penniless and soon to be homeless. Though she’s barely work

The Serpent King  by Jeff Zentner Publication Date:  March 8, 2016 Pages: 384 (hardcover) Genre: Young Adult  My Goodreads Rating: 3 Stars Goodreads Synopsis: Dill has had to wrestle with vipers his whole life—at home, as the only son of a Pentecostal minister who urges him to handle poisonous rattlesnakes, and at school, where he faces down bullies who target him for his father’s extreme faith and very public fall from grace. He and his fellow outcast friends must try to make it through their senior year of high school without letting the small-town culture destroy their creative spirits and sense of self. Graduation will lead to new beginnings for Lydia, whose edgy fashion blog is her ticket out of their rural Tennessee town. And Travis is content where he is thanks to his obsession with an epic book series and the fangirl turning his reality into real-life fantasy. Their diverging paths could mean the end of their friendship. But not before Dill confronts his dark legac

The Love That Split the World  by Emily Henry Publication Date:  January 16, 2016 Pages: 390 (hardcover) Genre: Young Adult  My Goodreads Rating:  3.5 Stars Goodreads Synopsis:  Natalie Cleary must risk her future and leap blindly into a vast unknown for the chance to build a new world with the boy she loves. Natalie’s last summer in her small Kentucky hometown is off to a magical start…until she starts seeing the “wrong things.” They’re just momentary glimpses at first—her front door is red instead of its usual green, there’s a pre-school where the garden store should be. But then her whole town disappears for hours, fading away into rolling hills and grazing buffalo, and Nat knows something isn’t right. That’s when she gets a visit from the kind but mysterious apparition she calls “Grandmother,” who tells her: “You have three months to save him.” The next night, under the stadium lights of the high school football field, she meets a beautiful boy named Beau, and i

The Accident Season  by Moira Fowley-Doyle Publication Date:  August 18, 2015 Pages:  304 (hardcover) Genre:  Young Adult  My Goodreads Rating:  4 Stars Goodreads Synopsis:  Every October Cara and her family become inexplicably and unavoidably accident-prone. Some years it's bad, like the season when her father died, and some years it's just a lot of cuts and scrapes. This accident season—when Cara, her ex-stepbrother, Sam, and her best friend, Bea, are 17—is going to be a bad one. But not for the reasons they think. Cara is about to learn that not all the scars left by the accident season are physical: There's a long-hidden family secret underneath the bumps and bruises. This is the year Cara will finally fall desperately in love, when she'll start discovering the painful truth about the adults in her life, and when she'll uncover the dark origins of the accident season—whether she's ready or not. My Review:  I really enjoyed the weirdn

Exit, Pursued by a Bear  by E.K. Johnston Publication Date: March 15, 2016 Pages:  248 (hardcover) Genre: Young Adult  My Goodreads Rating:  4.5 Stars Goodreads Synopsis: “ I love you,” Polly says suddenly when I’m almost to the door. “I know,” I say. Hermione Winters has been a flyer. She’s been captain of her cheerleading team. The envied girlfriend and the undisputed queen of her school. Now it’s her last year and those days and those labels are fading fast. In a few months she’ll be a different person. She thinks she’s ready for whatever comes next. But then someone puts something in her drink at a party, and in an instant she finds herself wearing new labels, ones she never imagined: Victim. Survivor. That raped girl. Even though this was never the future she imagined, one essential thing remains unchanged: Hermione can still call herself Polly Olivier’s best friend, and that may be the truest label of all. Heartbreaking and empowering, Exit, Pursued by a Bear is th

All of Us and Everything  by Bridget Asher Publication Date:  November 24, 2016 Pages: 352(paperback) Genre: Adult Fiction My Goodreads Rating: 3 Stars Goodreads Synopsis:  The Rockwell women are nothing if not . . . Well, it’s complicated. When the sisters—Esme, Liv, and Ru—were young, their eccentric mother, Augusta, silenced all talk of their absent father with the wild story that he was an international spy, always away on top-secret missions. But the consequences of such an unconventional upbringing are neither small nor subtle: Esme is navigating a failing marriage while trying to keep her precocious fifteen-year-old daughter from live-tweeting every detail. Liv finds herself in between relationships and rehabs, and Ru has run away from enough people and problems to earn her frequent flier miles. So when a hurricane hits the family home on the Jersey Shore, the Rockwells reunite to assess the damage—only to discover that the storm has unearthed a long-buried

Wrecked  by Maria Padian Publication Date: October 4, 2016 Pages: 368 (harcover/kindle) Genre: Young Adult/Realistic Fiction My Goodreads Rating: 3  Stars Net Galley Summary: Everyone has a different version of what happened that night at MacCallum College. Haley was already in bed when her roommate, Jenny, arrived home shellshocked from the wild Conundrum House party. Richard heard his housemate Jordan brag about the cute freshman he hooked up with. When Jenny accuses Jordan of rape, Haley and Richard find themselves pushed onto opposite sides of the school's investigation. But conflicting interests fueling conflicting versions of the story may make bringing the truth to light nearly impossible—especially when reputations, relationships, and whole futures are riding on the verdict. Maria Padian offers a kaleidoscopic view of a sexual assault on a college campus. Wrecked will leave readers thinking about how memory and identity, what's at stake and who sits in

The Trials of Apollo: The Hidden Oracle by Rick Riordan Publication Date: May 3, 2016 Pages: 384 (harcover) Genre: Young Adult/Fantasy My Goodreads Rating: 4 Stars Goodreads Synopsis: How do you punish an immortal? By making him human. After angering his father Zeus, the god Apollo is cast down from Olympus. Weak and disorientated, he lands in New York City as a regular teenage boy. Now, without his godly powers, the four-thousand-year-old deity must learn to survive in the modern world until he can somehow find a way to regain Zeus's favour. But Apollo has many enemies - gods, monsters and mortals who would love to see the former Olympian permanently destroyed. Apollo needs help, and he can think of only one place to go . . . an enclave of modern demigods known as Camp Half-Blood. My Review:  A couple of things before we get started:  1. I'm under the influence of cold medicine.  2. Rick is one of my favorite authors so I'm physicall

South of Sunshine by Dana Elmendorf Publication Date: April 1, 2016 Pages: 272 (kindle) Genre: Young Adult My Goodreads Rating: 2.5/3 Stars Goodreads Synopsis: What is Kaycee willing to risk for the sake of love? And what will she risk for acceptance? In Sunshine, Tennessee, the main event in town is Friday night football, the biggest party of the year is held in a field filled with pickup trucks, and church attendance is mandatory. For Kaycee Jean McCoy, life in Sunshine means dating guys she has no interest in, saying only “yes, ma’am” when the local bigots gossip at her mom’s cosmetics salon, and avoiding certain girls at all costs. Girls like Bren Dawson. Unlike Kaycee, Bren doesn’t really conceal who she is. But as the cool, worldly new girl, nobody at school seems to give her any trouble. Maybe there’s no harm if Kaycee gets closer to her too, as long as she can keep that part of her life a secret, especially from her family and her best friend. But the