Friday Reads - April 24, 2015

The Girl at Midnight by Melissa Grey
Pub. Date - April 28, 2015
4 stars



In this strange tale, birdlike creatures and dragonlike creatures have been immersed in a centuries long war in an underground, magically protected world apart from humans.  Echo, is a human girl, discovered by the Avicens and raised by one of their species.  She seamlessly travels between worlds while thieving her way through life as an orphan.  During the course of her thievery, she gets caught up in a desperate search for the powerful Firebird which grants power to the one who discovers it and has the power to end the violent war.  The start of this story is so much like Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor that I almost put it down, however, the storyline and the dynamic relationships between the characters kept me enthralled to the end.  I received an early EGalley of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest rating. 


Pieces of My Mother by Melissa Cistaro
Pub. Date - May 5, 2015
5 stars



Memoirs about missing parents seems to be a mainstay in the genre and while I normally find them sort of melodramatic, I found this book moving, beautifully written and at times very profound.  The author's free-spirited and alcoholic mother decided that she just couldn't raise her three young children and left them when the author was just four years old.  Now as a mother herself, the author looks back at the reasons her mother left while trying to determine if she could repeat the act herself.  As a mother, I found many really true statements in this book about the wish that all mother's have at some point to just leave for a while.  And while most mother's have this thought and realize that they couldn't even imagine actually leaving their children, the author's mother did just that.  It was heartbreaking but in a way that I didn't find overwrought.  This is a book that I could see myself re-reading certain passages of in the future, which is not a statement that I normally make about memoirs.  I received this an EGalley of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest rating.