Otherwise Alone by Shay Savage

Evan Arden is an ex-marine sniper turned hit man for a mafia boss in Chicago. He’s in exile and living in a shack in Arizona desert with a sniper rifle and his dog, Odin.  It’s a voluntary exile as punishment for a mission gone wrong. It’s the price he paid for working to a mob boss. Better be in a deserted land still breathing than be buried six feet under and dead. He can’t leave his shack unless he receives a go signal from someone he knew.

 

Fate, when it knocks to our door has this habit of making fun of us and then let us do shitty things unexpectedly. 

 

The day was scorching hot when he spotted through his rifle’s scope  a stumbling young woman going in the direction of his shack. He’s thinking to shoot the woman but change his mind considering she may be lost and killing her is a shitty thing to do.

 

Who would have thought a young woman would show up in front of his shack in the middle of nowhere and throw him off of his feet and fall for her in a short period of time. It’s been a while since he had a companion and a young woman for a company with just the two of them is a gift he wouldn’t turn down. What can I say more? Evan Arden is SMOKIN’ HOT.

 

Otherwise Alone is a quick read and I’m off to reading its prequel Otherwise Occupied.

 

★★★★★ 

Between Shades of Gray By Ruta Sepetys

I couldn’t  remember how I came across this book but I was lucky that I did.

 

I don’t know much about Stalin’s atrocities during his reign. I heard about him in one of our history class but I guess I didn’t pay much attention to him. I was in high school then. I knew about his name and that he was no different from Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s atrocities toward Jews were clearly imprinted in my mind until now. But Stalin’s wickedness, to my shame, were vague in my mind.

 

But why am I saying all this, you may ask? It was my first time to read something about what happened during World War 2. I lack courage reading these kinds of books because it overwhelms  me. As much as possible I tried to avoid this type because  I knew this kind  will haunt me even in my waking hours.

 

 

There’s something about this book that made me stopped reading it for a while. It’s painful to read something from someone clearly retold  one’s painful past and then open the wound just to be able to share it to the world. How one would go through such  inhumane treatment from another  person would break one’s heart. When my emotions started to become normal again, I never stop from reading it until I get to the last page.

 

It was June 14, 1941 when Lina Vilkas along with her mother and brother Jonas were forcibly taken out of  their house in the middle of the night by the NKVD. She was 15 years old then while his brother was only 10. She never saw her father again that night. Lina, her brother and mother will be sent to Siberia and had to travel by foot and by train with size 4×3 couches cramped and crowded with other Lithuanians, the same way they were pulled out from their own homes.

 

While inside the depressing train, there she met Andrius Arvydas, 17 years old, together with her mother. His father was in military. Like Lina, he never saw his father again.

 

I love romance novel specially if it has HEA. Though the story were brutal in some parts the happy ending made me love this book. Honestly I cried when someone close to Lina died. It really broke my heart when I read that part. It was painful. Every time I remembered that part I couldn’t keep myself from mumbling, Life was unfair.

 

 

Between Shades Of Gray is a must read for all book lovers.

★★★★★

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

What if your youngest daughter died of suicide? Then after a few months, 4 of your remaining daughters committed the same using different methods. Three  of them died while the remaining one was unsuccessful and lived. But then that sole survivor died of pill overdosed two months after she was discharged from the hospital. Are you a bad parent? Or is it bad genes? Who’s to blame?

 

 

How would you understand someone who’s mentally unstable? How would you accept it if your 13-year old daughter ended her life without even a trace of remorse? Do you  blame her? Or do you blame yourselves as parents? Do we really understand them? Or we are just making a pretense that we do understand them? I guess we may fully  understand them  if we’ve placed ourselves in their shoes.

 

I was fucking furious  right after reading this book. Pardon me for using such offensive word. I’m angry and I can’t avoid it. I felt hopelessness all throughout the book. I’m mad for the parents of Lux,  Mary, Therese, Bonnie and Cecilia.  I don’t think they deserved to be called parents at all. It was frustrating to see the five Lisbon girls slowly drifting  from reality and yet all the people who knew them were just spectators watching them go wasted. The neighborhood was like some moviegoers hooked to an entertaining show as if enjoying the scenes from a reality show. It was frustrating to read something like this book from a narrator who was only concerned with his obsessions for the Lisbon girls.

 

This book would really make you pissed off. The parents I think are the one insane and not their daughters. I think the main reason the five teens committed suicide is because they were insanely controlled by their mother,  Mrs. Lisbon. To make things worst Mr. Lisbon just let her wife controlled  their daughters. 

 

This book had brought out so much emotions from me. It’s ironic that the issue on suicide made the story very interesting, it will make you hooked on reading till its last page.

 

Would I recommend reading it? Definitely yes!

★★★★★

Boketto

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