Told from the perspective of fifteen-year-old Libby during the 1980s, the story starts one night when Libby's younger sister, Ellen, annoys their mom so bad that she kicks Ellen out of the car and tells her to walk home. Ellen decides to hitchhike her way back, only to get into the car of a strange man who doesn't seem willing to let her out, resulting in her having to jump. I was expecting this to be more of a thriller or mystery, following what happened after the car ride and them finding the guy who did it. That's not really the story, though. This is less a mystery/thriller and more a coming of age story about a family who just happened to have a girl who was molested in a car. I found Libby to be really boring as a narrator, and the timeline itself was very confusing - you'd be reading something present tense and all of a sudden, within the same paragraph, they suddenly jump to an event that happened years ago. The premise was interesting, but I found the writing style to be disjointed and the summary didn't really match what the book was.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. In school, while we covered the battles of WWII in great depth, Japanese internment camps were never really discussed in detail. Although a bit jarring at first, I liked following multiple characters (a different one each chapter) through their lives and learning about their unique struggles. All the kids are around each other for the most part, so we still see mostly the same characters but the chapter is just not told from their perspective. Although it would have been very long (maybe in another book?), I would have liked to return to some characters’ perspectives which I felt could have been developed a bit more. Honestly, I even cried one chapter but laughed in others.

This is a very slow-paced book about a sibling relationship. I do not feel like the synopsis did this book justice as I was expecting something different. The plot was lacking substance for me in general. Overall, it was an okay book that I wouldn't re-read.

Probably more of a three and a half star read, but rounded up because I couldn't seem to put it down. Mia is a London actress headed to LA to find her big break. While auditioning there, she meets a girl named Emily - who proceeds to be the weirdest person ever. After panicking about potentially running past her meter, Emily proceeds to give Mia her wallet and car keys so Mia can pay it for her. And then she vanishes. Gone. She leaves no contact info of any sort, nor does she wait by her car - instead she seems to disappear for days, leaving Mia, a complete stranger, with all her valuables and no idea what to do. Thus starts Mia's quest to find Emily, which is much harder than you would think it today's world - especially when it takes Mia a long time to figure out she should really open the wallet so she can at least have a last name for Emily. The book was quick paced and full of action, and I really felt for the terribly awkward position Mia was placed into. However, I didn't love the weird moments of sexism that the author threw in - I'm not sure why we had to have Mia have a "gut feeling" that it clearly could not have been a woman behind Emily's disappearance, for instance. The ending was also kind of over the top. I didn't LOVE this book, but I did enjoy it and I think it's good for a fun read.

"It's like when a plane descends, you know? Gradually, down through the clouds, and suddenly you can't see anything? Except, with a plane, eventually you see the city. There was no city for me." Filthy Animals revolves around the lives of three characters - Charles and Sophie, two dancers that are in a questionably open relationship, and Lionel, a man they meet at a dinner party who is dealing with the fallout from a failed suicide attempt. The majority of the stories follow one or all of these characters, with a few outlier stories that deal with other people struggling through life. All of the stories are poignant, as the characters deal with terminal medical diagnosis, the loss of estranged family members, and most of all, the inability to fully achieve what you want in life. I really enjoyed the stories about the main three, but some of the secondary stories dragged a little more. In some ways, the stories all seemed a little too similar. It was a quick read, but in this case that might not have been a good thing.

After getting into a fight with her roommate and abandoning her at a party, Charlie Jordan has become known on campus as "the girl who let her roommate get murdered." Though few will come out with their blame towards Charlie, the same can't be said for her roommate's family. You see, Charlie was at the party her roommate was last seen at, and she's pretty sure she saw the man who killed her. Unfortunately for Charlie, she has a tendency to get lost in her thoughts and hallucinate, so she's not sure what the man actually looked like - just what the figment of her imagination looked like, and he was something out of a Hollywood movie. Unable to deal with the guilt of being useless in the investigation, Charlie decides to use the local ride board to hitch a ride off campus and go home. Cue Josh Baxter, who just so happened to be at the board at the exact same time, and who is going in the same exact direction as Charlie needs to go. It seems like a perfect match! Unfortunately for Charlie, the further along the ride she goes, the more certain she is that the man she's with is not actually Josh Baxter. And he's probably not actually going to where she needs to go. And he seems to know things about her roommate's murder that he shouldn't know, things that were never released to the public. Stuck in the car with him for the rest of the night, Charlie has to do whatever it will take to survive. This is a great quick read, but there's nothing really spectacular about it. The main character getting "movies in her mind" was kind of weird and didn't really seem necessary to the plot at all. I really loved the idea of this book, but the execution of it wasn't there. It's definition something I couldn't put down, but it's not something I'd be likely to remember in a year.

This book is about two African American women who join the Women’s Army Corps in World War II. They are subjected to racism and violence and although they are like oil and water become friends given their common predicament. Since both are from New York City, the segregation and treatment they receive is alarming to them.

I love this book so much!

not very in depth but still good, nice story line, book of the other main character from a different series.

I've read many Lisa Jewell books and consider myself a fan. She does a great job of creating a realistic and vivid picture of her characters and their lives, and I usually enjoy following along as she tells their stories and gradually puts pieces together to solve a mystery or a puzzle of some kind. This book felt like Lisa Jewell "light," and read more like a romance novel. The book alternates between the lives of two young women making their way in London 70 years apart - Betty in the 1990s and Betty's step-grandmother Arlette in the 1920s. Both of them are extraordinarily beautiful, and other characters comment on this so often that it starts to seem ridiculous. I liked the story of Betty more than that of Arlette, but overall the characters in both time periods were flat, their problems were predictable and the book dragged on way too long. I had to force myself to finish it.