Turning Pages: Small Spaces

After a reading lull in March, I’ve been happily turning pages and listening to audio books consistently throughout April. The genres have been all over the place and my Reader Heart is happy.

For today’s post, however, I’d like to highlight the stories I’ve just finished and just begun 🙂

Last Night in Brooklyn by Xochitl Gonzalez

I don’t often enter giveaways. Not because I don’t think I’ll win, but simply because I just don’t think about them.

So, when I received a notification that I’d won an audio book from theStoryGraph, I didn’t even remember which book I’d entered for. Happily, though, my confusion quickly shifted and I dove into my most recent read, Last Night in Brooklyn.

It was wonderful!

SPRING, 2007

At twenty-six, Alicia Canales Forten feels smothered by her future. She’s in a long-distance relationship, living at home with her mother’s beliefs, saving up for her wedding to a future doctor. But after Alicia ventures out one night in the neighborhood of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, she finds herself lured by the siren song of youth and possibility that the striving crowd of creatives holds, and moves in.

No one embodies this milieu more than La Garza, a larger-than-life, up-and-coming fashion designer whose epic house parties fuel neighborhood lore. La Garza’s life, observed by Alicia from her apartment across the street, seems to hold the allure and fearlessness Alicia has never dared to imagine for herself.

But when Alicia’s wealthy banker cousin moves to the neighborhood, she finds herself increasingly drawn into both his and La Garza’s precarious lives.

Against the backdrop of a potentially life-changing presidential election and a looming once-in-a-generation fiscal crisis, Last Night in Brooklyn explores the dark compromise of the American Dream for people of color living, unknowingly, in the twilight of a cultural moment. It is a story about everything money can buy—and the destruction of what it can’t.

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By that evening, I’d made a mess of the Living Room, pulling out all the shoe boxes filled with CDs from under Lorraine’s bed and my own, neater, books of them. These objects we couldn’t part with, but no longer touched, since we burned them into our iPods years before.

Small Spaces Quartet by Katherine Arden

As part of my 50 before 50 bucket list, I’m reading all of the books written by one of my favorite authors, Katherine Arden. I first discovered her several years ago with her Winternight trilogy and have been a fan ever since.

After having them all on my Watchlist for months, I ordered the quartet off eBay and am finally diving in.

Set in contemporary Vermont, the Small Spaces Quartet is the story of three friends who face a series of horrifying games and schemes dreamed up by an ancient evil called the Smiling Man. Each book is attached to a season. We begin in the fall with Small Spaces, continue into a haunted winter with Dead Voices, move into a monstrous spring with Dark Waters and finally a terrifying summer with Empty Smiles.

First Line

October in East Evansburg, and the last warm sun of the year slanted red through the sugar maples.

She also has a new book, The Unicorn Hunters, being released in June, so I aim to finish these four before finishing strong with this new release.

Do tell! What are you reading these days?

Linking up this weekend to Book Beginnings with Gilion, The Friday 56 with Anne, and the Sunday Salon with Deb. Have a look around to see what everyone else is reading these days.

Onward,

Melissa