Sarah Kurz

"He stared at her.  This was not normal.  Was this an American thing or a Dovie thing, to acknowledge fear?"   Learning to Swear in America, by Katie Kennedy, is the story of 17-year-old Yuri Strelnikov, a physics prodigy from Russia who is sent to America to help stop an asteroid that's about to take out California.  Having earned the title of doctor before he even left his teens, Yuri knows very little about being a normal kid.  His goals included winning a Nobel Prize and don't include girls.  Then Dovie Collum, a 16-year-old artist with hippie parents, enters his life and Yuri begins to question the way he lives.  Dovie is Yuri's opposite in so many ways.  Where he is careful and precise she is full of life and color, and now Yuri must deal with his feeling for her while solving the little problem of the asteroid. This was very cute book.  Teenage me would have gobbled it right up.  Yuri and Dovie are a perfectly paired "oppos...

"I gave her permission to sound bad.  Think of how you sing when you're singing to the radio at full volume.  When you can't hear yourself, you're not afraid to really belt it out because you won't have to cringe when your voice breaks or you veer off key.  Daisy need that kind of freedom.  That takes a crapload of confidence.  And Daisy didn't actually have confidence.  She was always good.  Confidence is being okay being bad, not being okay being good." Daisy Jones & The Six, by  Taylor Jenkins Reid ,  was a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick and it definitely lived up to the hype.  Wrote in interview style, it's the fictional story of 1970s rock band The Six.  Brothers Billy and Graham Dunne formed the band and it quickly took off.  Fame led to temptation and Billy finds it too much to handle and spirals out of control until his wife, Camila pulls him back from the edge.  Things are going well for the band and ...

"I am not sorry, she realized.  She had chosen to live freely as a killer rather than die quietly as a slave, and she could not regret that.  She would go to her Saints with a ready spirit and hope they would receive her." Crooked Kingdom  is the second, and final, book in the duology by Leigh Bardugo and it is wonderful!  Like all good stories, it ended well before I was ready.  The second book continues the story from the first (naturally) and I won't elaborate because, well, spoilers.   We follow Kaz Brekker and his crew of misfit criminals through Ketterdam.  They are out for revenge and money and they won't stop until they get it.  Bardugo creates a nice variety of characters and we get a better understanding of each in the second book.  I found Kaz to be the perfect reluctant hero.  My heart broke for him through most of the book.  There's the perfect amount of action with just a hint of romance.  And lots ...