A mother is missing, presumed dead.  As the first anniversary of her death looms closer, Billie’s husband, Jonathan, is finding it hard to let go as he continues to work on his memoir about the loss.  Their daughter, Olive, begins seeing visions of her mother, telling Olive to come find her.  Did she really die in a hiking accident, or has she disappeared out of their lives on purpose?  As Olive investigates, Jonathan’s doubts begin to cloud his every thoughts.  He learns that Billie may not have been completely truthful about her weekend hiking excursions, thinking that she may have led a double life.  Full of twists and turns, I couldn’t believe the ending to Janelle Brown’s mystery.  It’ll leave you staying up way past your bedtime to find the next clue to Billie’s disappearance and the truth behind her identity.  (I speak from experience because that’s exactly what happened to me several nights in a row.)  Read more to let me tell you what I loved, and why I’m adding this the “Page-Turner” Club.

What would you do if you learned your cells were taken without your knowledge?  

What if those cells were used to develop vaccines, used for cancer research, and even helped create the cure for Polio?

Would you want to know?  Do you have a right to know? Do you have a right to compensation?

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks examines the mostly unknown story of the woman and her family that experienced just that.  Henrietta Lacks will forever be in the history books as the woman who gave us the HeLa cells, but those books do not tell the story behind the origin of those cells.  They don’t share the economic and social struggle her family endures, despite her cells being bought and sold for research by the billions.  Rebecca Skloot spent 10 years researching and getting to know Henrietta’s family to create this book.  Part scientific inquiry about HeLa cells, part medical mystery about what makes these cells immortal, part memoir about the history of the Lacks family, Skloot weaves a tale that I initially thought was fiction and was interested to find out was completely true.

Some days you just need to sit down with a good book of poetry and cry it out.  

Some days you just need to read one poem on the go to make you smile.

Milk and Honey is just that book. Pick it up at any time, read a few (or many) something you can pick up at any time, read a few (or many) poems, and find yourself changed a little bit for the better.  Broken into four parts, The Hurting, The Loving, The Breaking, The Healing, there is a poem for any occasion.  Short, sweet, and to the point, Rupi Kaur takes the hard in life and shows you how to learn and grow from it. ​

It’s early in the morning, and a fresh blanket of snow has just covered a sleepy suburb in Colorado.  All is calm until the body of high school student Lucinda Hayes is found on the playground.  When the popular and beloved girl is found murdered on school grounds, her entire community is shaken to its core.  In the days following Lucinda’s death, we follow the aftermath through the alternating perspectives of three specific people: the boy that loved her from afar, the girl that was jealous of her, and the officer investigating her murder.  Through their collective eyes, we learn more about how Lucinda has forever connected them together.

The narrators are unreliable, the perspective shifts, and the ending hits you out of nowhere.  I have a lot of thoughts on Danya Kukafka’s debut novel, Girl in Snow (out today!), and I’ll tell you all about this chilling novel as you read more.