I do it with the lights on: And 10 more discoveries on the road to a blissfully shame-free life (2016) by Whitney Way Thore

Thanks to Goodreads for the review and image!

 I Do It with the Lights On: And 10 More Discoveries on the Road to a Blissfully Shame-Free Life       From the star of TLC’s My Big Fat Fabulous Lifecomes an empowering memoir about letting go of your limitations and living the life you deserve. Right now.

Whitney Way Thore stands five feet two inches tall and weighs well over three hundred pounds, and she is totally, completely, and truly . . . happy. But she wasn’t always the vivacious, confident woman you see on TV. Gr From the star of TLC’s My Big Fat Fabulous Life comes an empowering memoir about letting go of your limitations and living the life you deserve. Right now.

Whitney Way Thore stands five feet two inches tall and weighs well over three hundred pounds, and she is totally, completely, and truly . . . happy. But she wasn’t always the vivacious, confident woman you see on TV. Growing up as a dancer, Whitney felt the pressure to be thin, a desire that grew into an obsession as she got older. From developing an eating disorder as a teenager, to extreme weight gain in college, to her ongoing struggle with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), Whitney reveals her fight to overcome the darkest moments in her life. She holds nothing back, opening up about the depths of her depression as well as her resilience in the face of constant harassment and mistreatment.

Now Whitney is on top of the world and taking no BS (Body Shame, of course). And she’s sharing the steps she took to get there and the powerful message behind her successful No Body Shame campaign. She even reveals her favorite “F” word (it’s probably not what you think), the thrill of doing it with the lights on, and the story behind the “Fat Girl Dancing” video that started it all.

Exuberant and utterly honest, I Do It with the Lights On is the inspiring story of how Whitney finally discovered her fabulousness when she stepped off the scale and into her life, embracing herself unconditionally—body, heart, and soul.

While they slept (2008) by Kathryn Harrison

 

 

A Kirkus Review

 

Novelist and memoirist Harrison (Envy, 2005, etc.) revisits a 1984 killing.

The author conducted six three-hour interviews with Billy Gilley, now serving multiple life sentences after being convicted at age 18 of murdering his abusive parents and younger sister Becky. Harrison also spoke with the surviving sister, Jody, who claimed to have been sexually abused by both Billy and their father. Although Jody managed to rise above her sordid past, eventually graduating from Georgetown and becoming a successful businesswoman, she was guarded in her account of the killings and the troubled family life that preceded it. Harrison tried to bond by revealing that she too had experienced sexual abuse at the hands of her father, but Jody remained wary. Billy proved even more evasive. Arrested for burglary and arson several times before the murders, he argued that he clubbed his parents to death with a baseball bat to rescue himself and Jody from routine beatings and constant psychological abuse. That he was beaten and tormented by both parents seems undeniable, but Billy failed to explain why he went on to kill Becky and sidestepped the question of whether he felt any remorse. Harrison has clearly done diligent research, but she too often resorts to quoting psychological reports and court testimony. Overreaching for connections between her own troubled past and Jody’s, she produces an overwrought text that isn’t as revelatory as it aspires to be. She does convincingly draw the Gilleys’ downward spiral into abuse, alcoholism and violence, a descent with family precedent (Billy’s maternal grandmother had shot and killed her cheating husband). But readers may balk at a tawdry tale more depressing than meaningful, populated by characters more pitiable than complex.
Worthy enough, but nowhere near the level of such true-crime masterpieces as In Cold Blood.

Where they found her (2015) by Kimberly McCreight

From the author of the New York Times bestseller and 2014 Edgar and Anthony nominee Reconstructing Amelia comes another harrowing, gripping novel that marries psychological suspense with an emotionally powerful story about a community struggling with the consequences of a devastating discovery.

At the end of a long winter, in bucolic Ridgedale, New Jersey, the body of an infant is discovered in the woods near the town’s prestigious university campus. No one knows who the baby is, or how her body ended up out there. But there is no shortage of opinions.

When freelance journalist, and recent Ridgedale transplant, Molly Anderson is unexpectedly called upon to cover the story for the Ridegdale Reader, it’s a risk, given the severe depression that followed the loss of her own baby. But the bigger threat comes when Molly unearths some of Ridgedale’s darkest secrets, including a string of unreported sexual assaults that goes back twenty years.

Meanwhile, Sandy, a high school dropout, searches for her volatile and now missing mother, and PTA president Barbara struggles to help her young son, who’s suddenly having disturbing outbursts.

Told from the perspectives of Molly, Barbara, and Sandy, Kimberly McCreight’s taut and profoundly moving novel unwinds the tangled truth about the baby’s death revealing that these three women have far more in common than they realized. And that their lives are more intertwined with what happened to the baby than they ever could have imagined. (less)

A great reckoning (2016) by Louise Penny

Thanks for this  Kirkus Review

Within a police force, some members must be trained in the science, and art, of solving murders. But does this training create people highly capable of committing them?

In Penny’s 12th Gamache novel, the former chief inspector takes up a new post. He’s not back to active investigating—not after finally having the chance to heal in the Québécois village of Three Pines. But he can’t pass up the chance to complete his yearslong fight to end corruption within the Sûreté. By taking the job as commander of the Sûreté Academy, he can clean the rot from its wealthiest source—the impressionable minds of cadet trainees. But Gamache makes a questionable decision in choosing to fight fire with fire. He decides to keep the most corrupt staff member, Serge “the Duke” Leduc, the former No. 2 of the Academy. Gamache’s choices verge on madness when he announces he will also bring on Michel Brébeuf—the original domino to fall within the Sûreté—as an example of how corruption can ruin you.

 In his lessons, Gamache invites his cadets to internalize these mottos: “Don't trust everything you think”—words for bettering their minds and investigative skills—as well as “a man's foes shall be they of his own household,” from Matthew 10:36—words of warning for what they may face ahead. These lessons become all too relevant when the Duke is found murdered and it’s clear the murderer is one of them. And then a copy of an old map is found at the crime scene, the same map Gamache is using as an exercise with four cadets he has brought under his wing and into his home (one lost soul in particular, freshman Amelia Choquet).

Gamache is forced to accept that Leduc’s grip on the Academy is stronger and more suffocating than he thought possible. Is the household he has vowed to protect more unsafe than ever before? Young, learning minds are precious things, and Penny is here to make us aware of the evil out there, eager for a chance to mold—and poison—them.
A chilling story that's also filled with hope—a beloved Penny trademark.

White Heat (2011) by M.J. McGrath

By Beth Jones of The Telegram

5:53AM GMT 13 Mar 2011

The cold, bleak tundra of the Canadian Arctic holds something of a fascination for Melanie McGrath. In 2006 she published a non-fiction book, The Long Exile, in which she wrote about Inuit families who, during the Cold War years, were lured to the wastes of the High Arctic by a government eager to populate these northern territories and so assert their sovereignty, and then abandoned.

In White Heat, a crime thriller written under the name MJ McGrath, she returns to the Arctic, this time to the tiny settlement of Autisaq. Here, on the “immense and uncompromising” tundra, a visiting tourist, Felix Wagner, is killed while on a shooting expedition led by the local guide Edie Kiglatuk, a half white, half Inuit former polar bear hunter. The local elders are keen to dismiss the death as an accident. Only Edie is left unsettled.

Edie is a struggling alcoholic who, by her mid-twenties had “already drunk away her hunting career and was well on the way to drinking away her life”. She spends her days watching old movies, making ear picks from bones and eating seal blood soup. But while the death of an outsider can be ignored, when someone within the community is suddenly killed, Edie takes it upon herself to find out the truth, even if it is “like hunting a fish in murky water with nothing but your hands”.

Edie is an ingenious and original creation backed up by a cast of crazy scientists, corrupt officials, placid policemen, Russian oil men and locals lost in “a fog of drink, boredom, unwanted pregnancies, low expectations and educational underachievement”.

But the most addictive character – both hero and villain of the piece – is the Arctic itself. It makes a seductive location for a thriller, a land of wonder and terror shut in darkness for months of the year, a place in which temperatures rarely rise above freezing and, in winter, regularly fall below -40ºC.

"Sadly, this review does not mention Edie's stepson, Joe, as he struggles to overcome his isolated and negative environment. Her ex-husband is a loser who only drags her down, while his brother is campaigning to be mayor and is embroiled in the worst of politics." CA

The boy in the snow (2013) by Melanie McGrath

 

www.melaniemcgrath.com/the-boy-in-the-snow.html  Thanks for review from: www.melaniemcgrath.com/the-boy-in-the-snow.html

The Boy in the Snow first published 2013 (Fourth Estate) When Arctic guide Edie Kiglatuk stumbles across a boy's body in the Alaskan forest, she little imagines what her discovery will lead her to. With the local police convinced the death is linked to the Dark Believers, a sinister offshoot of the Russian Orthodox Church, Edie's friends insist she leave the investigation to the proper authorities. But remaining in the area as back-up for her ex-husband Sammy's bid to win the famous Iditarod dog sled race, Edie cannot get the frozen corpse out of her mind. While Sammy travels across some of the world's toughest and most deadly terrain, Edie sets off on an investigation which will take her into a dark world of sex, politics, corruption and greed - as a painful secret from her past finally catches up with her... Excerpt Where the tracks gave out onto the packed snow of the path, not far from the snowmobile, Edie Kiglatuk spotted a bright yellow object lying at the base of a spruce, protected from the snowfall by the tree’s branches. Closer up she was surprised to see that the yellow object was a tiny wood-plank house of the sort you might make for a small dog, about a metre long and half as wide. A very thin layer of snow had collected on the roof but there was none banked up against the sides, suggesting that the house had been there since the last snowfall, but most likely not much longer. There were no animal or human tracks around and the little house sat as if it had always been there in the snow, as if it belonged to some other reality. Crouching down with her right hand she turned the lever on the little door. Inside she could see something but it was too dark to pick out any details. She went back to the snowmobile, took her flashlight out of the pannier. The light revealed a package wrapped in a very elaborately embroidered red cloth. Edie reached out carefully and touched it. Whatever was inside was long frozen and very hard. She stood up with the package in her hand and moved over to the snowmobile, resting it on the saddle so she could take a better look. Tucked under the ornate fabric was a square of white linen-like cloth. She pinched it between her finger and thumb. Almost instantly, the cloth came away, exposing what lay inside. There, lying on the saddle of the snowmobile, was the body of a baby boy, a month or maybe two in age, lying on his belly, dead and hard frozen. The boy’s arms were raised, the hands balled into tiny fists, the legs angled down from the body as if in repose. His skin glittered with ice crystals. Reaching out, she slowly turned the boy over. His face was veiled with ice, the eyes closed, and he wore an expression of softness and calm. Onto the delicate new skin of the boy’s body someone had smeared grease and what looked like charcoal, or maybe ashes, in an elaborate, inverted cross.

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Harbour Street (2014) by Ann Cleeves

 

Harbour Street is the sixth book in Ann Cleeves' crime novel series VERA - which is a major TV detective drama starring Brenda Blethyn on ITV. As the snow falls thickly on Newcastle, the shouts and laughter of Christmas revellers break the muffled silence. Detective Joe Ashworth and his daughter Jessie are swept along in the jostling crowd onto the Metro. But when the train is stopped due to the bad weather, and the other passengers fade into the swirling snow, Jessie notices that an old lady hasn't left the train: Margaret Krukowski has been fatally stabbed as she sat on the crowded train. Nobody, including the policeman himself, sees the stabbing take place. Margaret's murderer is seemingly invisible; her killing motiveless. Why would anyone want to harm this reserved, elegant lady? Arriving at the scene, DI Vera Stanhope is relieved to have an excuse to escape the holiday festivities. As she standing on the silent, snow-covered station platform, Vera feels a familiar buzz of anticipation, sensing that this will be a complex and unusual case. Soon Vera and Joe are on their way to the south Northumberland town of Mardle, where Margaret lived, to begin their inquiry. Then, just days later, a second woman is murdered. Vera knows that to find the key to this new killing she needs to understand what had been troubling Margaret so deeply before she died - before another life is lost. She can feel in her bones that there's a link. Retracing Margaret's final steps, Vera finds herself searching deep into the hidden past of this seemingly innocent neighbourhood, led by clues that keep revolving around one street...Why are the residents of Harbour Street so reluctant to speak? Told with piercing prose and a forensic eye, Ann Cleeves' gripping new novel explores what happens when a community closes ranks to protect their own - and at what point silent witnesses become complicit. Also available in the Vera Stanhope series are The Crow Trap, Telling Tales, Hidden Depths, Silent Voices and The Glass Room. Ann Cleeves' Shetland series (BBC television drama SHETLAND) contains five titles, of which Dead Water is the most recent.  

 

Thank you Goodreads for this summary.

Broken Harbour (2012) by Tana French

Tana French returns to the quiet intrigue of the family psychodrama in her fourth novel, Broken Harbour, revelling once again in the slyly ironic and layered implications of the title to point the reader in the right direction.

And once again we have an unreliable narrator and an event from the past that alters his perceptions and affects his ability to recognize parallels in the present. Dublin Murder Squad shining star Mick (Scorcher) Kennedy is called out to a crime scene with his new rookie partner, Richie; a family has been slaughtered, something even a seasoned cop would describe as evil.

Things have gone very wrong indeed in the decayed domestic paradise of Ocean View, Brians-town, disparagingly known as “Broken Harbour” – victim, like many others, of Ireland’s recession: “rows of half-built houses, crowded stark and ugly against the sky, a long banner of plastic flapping hard from a bare beam.” It’s evidence of Ireland’s devastating boom and bust in real estate, where humankind’s mark on the landscape is crumbling while the landscape remains vast and beautiful.

Moral devastation exists here too: The children have been smothered in their beds and the husband and wife viciously stabbed. But there’s a survivor – the wife. Though severely injured, she might recover and be able to tell her story.

In the meantime, Kennedy investigates, and what originally seems fairly cut and dried – husband goes crazy and kills family and self – looks as if it might be something altogether different. For in the otherwise well-kept house are gaping holes in the walls, all kinds of video monitors, as well as a vicious animal trap in the attic that’s big enough for a bear. Paranoia? Delusions? Or has someone been stalking this seemingly happy family?

Kennedy firmly believes that, 90 per cent of the time, this kind of crime doesn’t happen out of nowhere. People invite murder and chaos into the house, and the roots of evil are in the heart of the home, the family. Broken Harbour does double duty as a domestic horror novel about boundaries and transgression: When earth is outside where it belongs, it is soil; when it crosses the barrier of the threshold, it becomes dirt, and no longer belongs.

In French’s previous novel, Faithful Place, the cop dug relentlessly into the past. Here, Kennedy refuses to examine his own history too closely, a history inextricably and secretly linked to Broken Harbour itself. Instead, his entire life is about control. He is happy enough to delve into the lives of the murder victims, but the implications and effects of the darker moments of his own childhood remain opaque. But who can blame him? His mother committed suicide, and one of his sisters is schizophrenic or just plain crazy – whether due to nature or nurture is unclear. Control is the key to everything from handling suspects to wearing immaculate suits and ties, allowing him to present an unassailable front.

Kennedy refuses to see the contradictions in his own life. He states that he doesn’t like “dealing with unusual people,” but his whole life has been spent doing that very thing, from his own family to his chosen profession – a Murder Squad detective who hunts down the unusual people who have broken the ultimate rule. But Kennedy’s famous control starts to unravel, and his own flaws, and his inability to recognize the weaknesses of his partner, help to almost destroy the case.

And though a solution is provided, order does not prevail; the chaos of ordinary lives wins out – tragic losses, crazed siblings, the weight of years spent denying old truths. As Kennedy wonders “whether anything in families is ever innocent,” so does the reader. Broken Harbour shows us the terrible sacrifices people make and the awful things they do based on love, and sometimes, terror and need.

Tana French leaves us lost in a dark labyrinth in which the Minotaur is never conquered, navigating a deceptively placid, reflective sea under which the terrible reefs of the past wait patiently to wreak havoc with the most seasoned traveller
 

Sandra Kasturi is most recently the co-editor and publisher of Imaginarium 2012: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing. Thanks for this in-depth review.