BOOK HAUL: Stacking the Shelves 2!

My second Stacking the Shelves post! I did a book haul a few weeks ago if you missed it, but I have still accumulated more books since then.

Stacking the Shelves is a weekly post hosted by Reading Reality and you can see all the details about Stacking the Shelves on their page. Basically Stacking the Shelves is a weekly thing where you share all the books (electronic or physical) that you have acquired that week.

As a disclaimer, the shelves in the header photo are not mine. I took this photo at Mostly Books in Tucson. I adored this small independent bookstores and will be back!

eBooks!!

My One and Only Earl by Stacy Reid

I finished my first Stacy Reid book yesterday and when I saw this one was free I had to hop on that.

Synopsis: James, Lord Kingsley’s best friend’s dying wish was that he married his spinster sister. Unluckily, James is honor-bound to fulfill another oath and can never marry Miss Poppy Ashford, no matter how delightfully charming and sensual he finds her.

Treated horridly by her stepmother and half-sisters, Poppy has little to anticipate for her future. She is stunned when the devilishly handsome and most sought-after Lord Kingsley suggests a scheme that might make her more eligible and appealing to the marriage-minded gentlemen of society. Eager at the chance of a future that is more than her working as a governess, Poppy agrees to his lessons—even the ones in kissing!

Poppy knew every laugh, dance, and stolen kisses were just a pretense. So why did James make her heart throb so strongly, and why did her impossible dreams now include an earl she had little hopes of ever marrying?

physical books!!

Matrix by Lauren Groff

Do I know anything about this one? No. But it was $2 at my library book store and I am pretty sure I saw some solid reviews.

Synopsis: Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, 17-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease.

At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. Marie, born the last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. But in a world that is shifting and corroding in frightening ways, one that can never reconcile itself with her existence, will the sheer force of Marie’s vision be bulwark enough?

Equally alive to the sacred and the profane, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in a mesmerizing portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith, and a woman that history moves both through and around. Lauren Groff’s new novel, her first since Fates and Furies, is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world

Night by Eli Wiesel

This is one of these books that I can’t believe I haven’t read yet. So I picked it up at a local used bookstore on a whim.

Synopsis: Born in the town of Sighet, Transylvania, Elie Wiesel was a teenager when he and his family were taken from their home in 1944 to Auschwitz concentration camp, and then to Buchenwald. Night is the terrifying record of Elie Wiesel’s memories of the death of his family, the death of his own innocence, and his despair as a deeply observant Jew confronting the absolute evil of man. This new translation by his wife and most frequent translator, Marion Wiesel, corrects important details and presents the most accurate rendering in English of Elie Wiesel’s testimony to what happened in the camps and of his unforgettable message that this horror must simply never be allowed to happen again.

The Lonely Hearts Hotel by Heather O’Neil

Another one I don’t know much about but I saw some hype for like four years ago. It was 50 cents and in a moment of weakness I told myself I needed this one.

Synopsis: With echoes of The Night Circus, a spellbinding story about two gifted orphans in love with each other since they can remember whose childhood talents allow them to rewrite their future.

The Lonely Hearts Hotel is a love story with the power of legend. An unparalleled tale of charismatic pianos, invisible dance partners, radicalized chorus girls, drug-addicted musicians, brooding clowns, and an underworld whose economy hinges on the price of a kiss. In a landscape like this, it takes great creative gifts to thwart one’s origins. It might also take true love.

Two babies are abandoned in a Montreal orphanage in the winter of 1910. Before long, their talents emerge: Pierrot is a piano prodigy; Rose lights up even the dreariest room with her dancing and comedy. As they travel around the city performing clown routines, the children fall in love with each other and dream up a plan for the most extraordinary and seductive circus show the world has ever seen.

Separated as teenagers, sent off to work as servants during the Great Depression, both descend into the city’s underworld, dabbling in sex, drugs and theft in order to survive. But when Rose and Pierrot finally reunite beneath the snowflakes after years of searching and desperate poverty the possibilities of their childhood dreams are renewed, and they’ll go to extreme lengths to make them come true. Soon, Rose, Pierrot and their troupe of clowns and chorus girls have hit New York, commanding the stage as well as the alleys, and neither the theater nor the underworld will ever look the same.

With her musical language and extravagantly realized world, Heather O’Neill enchants us with a novel so magical there is no escaping its spell

If you’ve read any of these, where should I start?

xoxo, Tree