Bookish Travels—April 2023 Destinations

I saw this meme on It’s All About Books and thought, I like this!! So, I decided to do it once a month also. Many thanks to Yvonne for initially posting this!!

This post is what it says: Places I travel to in books each month. Books are lovely and take you to places you would never get to. That includes places of fantasy too!!

Bon Voyage!!

Please let me know if you have read these books or traveled to these areas.


Earth 2

Government, Settlement

United States

New York (Crescent Cove), Nevada (Las Vegas)
Maryland (Pikesville)
California (Los Angeles)
Washington (Seattle)
New York (Seneca Springs)
Colorado (Longmont)
Kansas (Liverly)
Indiana (English), California (San Fransisco), Virginia (Perryville), Arizona (Tombstone), New York (New York City)
North Carolina (Neapolis)
New York (Manhattan), California (Newport Beach, Balboa Island, Newport, Menlo Park, Santa Barbara, Montecito, Goleta)
Louisiana (Unknown city), Rhode Island (Emerald Bay)
Unknown State (Unknown City)
New York (New York City, New Rochelle)
Wyoming (Wallace), Iowa (Fort Madison)
West Virginia (Huntington), Ohio (Crown City)
Pennsylvania
California (Mojave Desert, Aspen Flats, Pasatiempo, Santa Cruz, Watsonville, Aptos, Pajaro Dunes)
Southern California, Arizona
Colorado (Denver, Arvada)
Illinois (Chicago, Downers Grove)
Connecticut (Wingate)
New York (New York City, Brooklyn)

Western Foalinaarc

University of Western Foalinaarc

England

Unknown City
Regency London, Kingsclere, Amesbury, Bath
Oxford
Richmond-on-Thames, London, Birmingham, Guildford, Penzance
Oxford
Colchester, London

Hell


Train

Pan Pacifica

The Czech Republic

Prague

Italy

Florence, Rome, Tuscany

France

Paris

Post Apocalyptic Earth

ARC (fall-out shelter), Hope City

Ukraine


The Netherlands

Amsterdam

Canada

Toronto, Niagara Falls

South Korea

Seoul

Malta


Island States

Prospera, Annex, Nursery Isle

Kenya

Nairobi

April 2023 Wrap Up

Here is what I read/posted in April.

As always, let me know if you have read any of these books and (if you did) what you thought of them.


Books I Read:

ARC from author
KU Purchase—No Review
Free Kindle Purchase—No Review
Free Kindle Purchase—No Review
Non-ARC from Novel Cause
Non-ARC from Novel Cause
ARC from Sourcebooks Casablanca
ARC from author, Level Best Books, IBPA, Member’s Titles
Free Kindle Purchase—No review
Free Kindle Purchase—No Review
Non-ARC from author
KU Purchase—No Review
Free Amazon Prime Reads—No Review
KU Purchase—No Review
KU Purchase—No Review
KU Purchase—No Review
ARC from St. Martin’s Press, Wednesday Books
ARC from St. Martin’s Press
Non-ARC from Author
Non-ARC from Author
KU Purchase—No Review
KU Purchase—No Review
KU Purchase—No Review
ARC from St. Martin’s Press, St. Martin’s Paperbacks
ARC from Sourcebooks Fire
Non ARC from author
Free Kindle Purchase—No Review
Kindle Purchase—No Review
KU Purchase—No Review
Free Kindle Purchase—No Review
ARC from author
ARC from Crooked Lane Books
ARC from Sourcebooks Casablanca
ARC from Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine, Ballantine Books
ARC from Random House Publishing Group – Random House, Dial Press Trade Paperback

Books I got from NetGalley:

Read Now from St. Martin’s Press, Minotaur Books
Wish granted from Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine, Bantam
Wish Granted from Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine, Bantam
Read Now from Tor Publishing Group, Tor Books
Wish Granted from Sourcebooks Casablanca
Wished Granted from Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine, Delacorte Press
Invite from Random House Publishing Group – Random House, Random House Trade Paperbacks
SMP Influencer Program pick from St. Martin’s Press, Minotaur Books
Wish Granted from Random House Publishing Group – Random House, The Dial Group
Wish Granted from Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine, Ballantine Books
Request from Meryl Media Group, Rosewind Books

Books I got from Authors/Indie Publishers:

Non-Arc from author
ARC from Novel Cause
ARC from author
Non ARC from author
Non-ARC from author
Non-ARC from author
ARC from Author

Giveaway Winners

Goodreads Giveaway—Kindle download
Goodreads Giveaway—Paperback
Goodreads Giveaway—Paperback
Goodreads Giveaway—Paperback

Books Reviewed:

The Witch and the Vampire—review here

Prince of Typgar: Nurjan and the Monks of Meirar—review here

Read to Death at the Lakeside Library—review here

Dirty Laundry by Disha Bose—review here

Body Count by SM Thomas—review here

Prince of Typgar: Nujran and the Corpse in the Quadrangle by Krishna Sudhir—review here

Wings Once Cursed and Bound by Piper J. Drake—review here

No Time to Breathe by Lori Duffy Foster—review here

Another Chance at Happiness by Dani Phoenix—review here

Tales from the Box, Volume 1 by Weston Kincaide—review here

Pieces of Me by Kate McLaughlin—review here

Where Coyotes Howl by Sandra Dallas—review here

Bait by D.I. Jolly—review here

Missing by Amy Kulp—review here

How to Best a Marquess—review here

This Delicious Death—review here


Reading Challenges:

2023 Monthly Themes (Continue a series or reread an author already read this year): Claim My Baby—Finished 3-31-23

Romanceopoly 2023! (Read a book where the main character works at or owns a bar)-About LoveFinished 4-1-23

Buzzword Reading Challenge 2023 (words in the title related to emotions, from happy to sad, smile to frown, pride to rage)—P.S. I Hate You—Finished 4-3-23

2023 Sami Parker Reads Title Challenge (a book with one of these words in the title: Sunny, Bright, Cloud or Rain): Brightest Shadow—Finished 4-6-2023

Cover Scavenger Hunt 2023 (a flower): A Spirited Manor—Finished 4-7-2023

The StoryGraph’s OnBoarding Reading Challenge 2023 (read one of the first 10 books you added to your to-read pile): The Night Swim—Finished 4-8-2023

The StoryGraph Reads the World 2023 (Italy): Find Me—Finished 4-10-2023

The StoryGraph’s Genre Challenge (a biography about someone you don’t know much about): Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot—Finished 4-11-2023

Beat the Backlist 2023 (take place primarily in winter or a cold region): Tainted—Finished 4-19-2023

Scavenger Hunt TBR Book Challenge (go to the acknowledgments of the last book you read for this prompt. What name did you first see? Find a book written by an author with that name): Frost Burn—Finished 4-20-2023

Scavenger Hunt (Book I found that day): Delicate Ink—Finished 4-20-2023

Popsugar Reading Challenge 2023 (a book by a first time author): The Fifth Floor—Finished 4-21-23

2023 TBR Toppler (continue a series): Ten Thousand Lies—Finished 4-22-23

2023 Reading Challenge (book that has been on my TBR for the longest time): Purple Death—Finished 4-23-23

2023 ABC Challenge (D): Descendants—Carrying over to May

2023 TBR Prompts (A BookTok Favorite): The Song of Achilles—Carrying over to May

Pieces of Me by Kate McLaughlin

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press, Wednesday Books

Date of publication: April 18th, 2023

Trigger Warnings: Attempted Suicide, Child Abuse, Sexual Assualt, Alchohol Abuse, Mental Illness

Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary, Mental Health, Fiction, Realistic Fiction, Mystery, Young Adult Contemporary, Thriller, Mystery Thriller

Purchase Links: Kindle | B&N | WorldCat

Goodreads Synopsis:

he next gut-punching, compulsively readable Kate McLaughlin novel, about a girl finding strength in not being alone.

When eighteen-year-old Dylan wakes up, she’s in an apartment she doesn’t recognize. The other people there seem to know her, but she doesn’t know them – not even the pretty, chiseled boy who tells her his name is Connor. A voice inside her head keeps saying that everything is okay, but Dylan can’t help but freak out. Especially when she borrows Connor’s phone to call home and realizes she’s been missing for three days.

Dylan has lost time before, but never like this.

Soon after, Dylan is diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder, and must grapple not only with the many people currently crammed inside her head, but that a secret from her past so terrible she’s blocked it out has put them there. Her only distraction is a budding new relationship with Connor. But as she gets closer to finding out the truth, Dylan wonders: will it heal her or fracture her further?


First Line:

Wake up. I snuggle deeper into the blankets, trying to puysh away the voice in my head.

Pieces of Me by Kate McLaughlin

When Dylan wakes up in an unknown apartment, she is freaked out. She has no idea where she is or how she got there. She is doubly freaked out when she calls home and realizes she has been missing for three days. Things go from bad to worse when Dylan attempts suicide and is hospitalized. She is soon diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder. As she begins to accept her diagnosis, she realizes there is a reason why her alters were created. With the help of Connor, the man whose apartment she woke up in, Dylan begins to unravel the secrets to why her alters were created. Will she uncover the truth, and if she does, will she be able to start to heal? Or will the truth destroy her?

Usually, I would have left the trigger warnings where they are at the beginning of the review. But, in this case, I am going to list them. Listing the triggers with how raw this book is will help you decide on reading it. The triggers are:

  1. Attempted Suicide: One of Dylan’s alters, Scratch, a protector alter, decided that the only way to help Dylan was to kill herself. Dylan woke up (for lack of a better word) right after Scratch’s attempt.
  2. Childhood Sexual Abuse: Dylan created her alters to protect herself from years of sexual abuse from someone she knew.
  3. Sexual Assualt: See above
  4. Alcohol Abuse: Dylan abused alcohol regularly in high school.
  5. Mental Illness: Dylan suffers from many mental illnesses, including anxiety and borderline personality disorder. She is diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder after her suicide attempt.

If any of these trigger you, I recommend not reading this book.

As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, this is a raw book. I was unprepared for how raw it was and how it affected me. The emotions of Dylan, her family, and her friends came off the page and affected me to the point where I needed to put the book down. I couldn’t breathe because I was so upset with everything in the book.

Pieces of Me main storyline follows Dylan, her eventual diagnosis, her numerous alters, the treatment, her remembering of what happened, and what happens when she breaks her silence. I found the entire storyline heartbreaking. I was glad that the author chose to show Dylan’s memories of her childhood sexual abuse selectively. I don’t know if I could have dealt with reading what a grown man did to a 5-year-old. Some parts of the storyline felt unreal, like Dylan initially coming to her DiD diagnosis through a questionnaire her best friend found. But that aside, this storyline did keep me glued to the book.

I wasn’t too sure about how I felt about Dylan or her alters. I felt terrible because she was dealing with severe mental health issues. She came across as very immature during the book’s first half. But, I did see her character grow with her when she officially got her DiD diagnosis. The rules she set down for her alters were funny and sad at the same time. But I liked that her internal house (where her alters lived) also changed. The author spent time introducing the main alters and explaining their roles.

There were several secondary characters in Pieces of Me. I thought Dylan’s best friend was an alter until her brother started hooking up with her best friend. Speaking of her brother, I couldn’t stand him, but I got that he was so skeptical of Dylan’s diagnosis. Still, it didn’t excuse his behavior.

I wasn’t a fan of Dylan’s romance angle with Connor. I thought it was too fast, too soon. But he was good for her and did his homework when it came to being with someone with DiD.

Pieces of Me had a happyish ending. I say happyish because Dylan’s abuser was finally being brought to justice. But it caused a massive schism in her family. But the author did leave room for healing, and Dylan understood why a specific person in her life wanted to stand by her abuser. I liked how the alters was becoming accepting of integrating with Dylan. I almost wished there was an epilogue showing Dylan 5 years down the road and where she was in her journey.

I want to add that the author did post an author’s note at the end of the book. It explained the amount of research the author did on DiD.

I recommend Pieces of Me to anyone over 18. There is language, sexual situations (nongraphic), and violence. Also, see my trigger warning list above.

Many thanks to St. Martin’s Press, Wednesday Books, NetGalley, and Kate McLaughlin for allowing me to read and review Pieces of Me. All opinions stated in this review are mine.


If you enjoyed reading this review of Pieces of Me, then you will enjoy reading these books:


Other books by Kate McLaughlin:

WWW Wednesday: April 12th, 2023

WWW Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Sam at Taking on a World of Words.

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?


What I Recently Finished Reading:

At first, Misha Orlov was the boss who got me pregnant.
But he has become so much more than just that.
He’s my husband and the father of my babies (yes, as in plural).
He’s my pakhan.
He’s my last hope.

Because of all the people in this messed-up world, he’s the only one I can trust to save me.
As bad men loom and my babies prepare to arrive, we’re both faced with a choice.
Can we let go of the pasts that shaped us?
Or will our scars become our undoing?

CHAMPAGNE WRATH is the second and final book of the Orlov Bratva duet. The story begins in Book 1, CHAMPAGNE VENOM.


What I am currently reading:

The next gut-punching, compulsively readable Kate McLaughlin novel, about a girl finding strength in not being alone.

When eighteen-year-old Dylan wakes up, she’s in an apartment she doesn’t recognize. The other people there seem to know her, but she doesn’t know them – not even the pretty, chiseled boy who tells her his name is Connor. A voice inside her head keeps saying that everything is okay, but Dylan can’t help but freak out. Especially when she borrows Connor’s phone to call home and realizes she’s been missing for three days.

Dylan has lost time before, but never like this.

Soon after, Dylan is diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder, and must grapple not only with the many people currently crammed inside her head, but that a secret from her past so terrible she’s blocked it out has put them there. Her only distraction is a budding new relationship with Connor. But as she gets closer to finding out the truth, Dylan wonders: will it heal her or fracture her further?


What books I think I’ll read next:

Beautifully rendered, Where Coyotes Howl is a vivid and deeply affecting ode to the early twentieth century West, from master storyteller Sandra Dallas.

Except for the way they loved each other, they were just ordinary, everyday folks. Just ordinary.

1916. The two-street town of Wallace is not exactly what Ellen Webster had in mind when she accepted a teaching position in Wyoming, but within a year’s time she’s fallen in love—both with the High Plains and with a handsome cowboy named Charlie Bacon. Life is not easy in the flat, brown corner of the state where winter blizzards are unforgiving and the summer heat relentless. But Ellen and Charlie face it all together, their relationship growing stronger with each shared success, and each deeply felt tragedy.

Ellen finds purpose in her work as a rancher’s wife and in her bonds with other women settled on the prairie. Not all of them are so lucky as to have loving husbands, not all came to Wallace willingly, and not all of them can survive the cruel seasons. But they look out for each other, share their secrets, and help one another in times of need. And the needs are great and constant. The only city to speak of, Cheyenne, is miles away, making it akin to the Wild West in rural Wallace. In the end, it is not the trials Ellen and Charlie face together that make them remarkable, but their love for one another that endures through it all.

Amber thought her life was perfect. She was in love with her boyfriend Frankie, had a nice summer job at Taylor’s Book and was enrolled at Marshall University to become a teacher. Everything was on track for the perfect life.

In this spellbinding exploration of the varieties of love, the author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name revisits its complex and beguiling characters decades after their first meeting.

No novel in recent memory has spoken more movingly to contemporary readers about the nature of love than André Aciman’s haunting Call Me by Your Name. First published in 2007, it was hailed as “a love letter, an invocation . . . an exceptionally beautiful book” (Stacey D’Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review). Nearly three quarters of a million copies have been sold, and the book became a much-loved, Academy Award–winning film starring Timothée Chalamet as the young Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver, the graduate student with whom he falls in love.

In Find Me, Aciman shows us Elio’s father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, who has become a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train with a beautiful young woman upends Sami’s plans and changes his life forever.

Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, now a New England college professor with a family, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return trip across the Atlantic.

Aciman is a master of sensibility, of the intimate details and the emotional nuances that are the substance of passion. Find Me brings us back inside the magic circle of one of our greatest contemporary romances to ask if, in fact, true love ever dies.

The anchor of The O’Reilly Factor recounts in gripping detail the brutal murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy—and how a sequence of gunshots on a Dallas afternoon not only killed a beloved president but also sent the nation into the cataclysmic division of the Vietnam War and its culture-changing aftermath.

In January 1961, as the Cold War escalates, John F. Kennedy struggles to contain the growth of Communism while he learns the hardships, solitude, and temptations of what it means to be president of the United States. Along the way he acquires a number of formidable enemies, among them Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, and Allen Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In addition, powerful elements of organized crime have begun to talk about targeting the president and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

In the midst of a 1963 campaign trip to Texas, Kennedy is gunned down by an erratic young drifter named Lee Harvey Oswald. The former Marine Corps sharpshooter escapes the scene, only to be caught and shot dead while in police custody.

The events leading up to the most notorious crime of the twentieth century are almost as shocking as the assassination itself.

April TBR 2023

March has flown by for me (I don’t know about you guys).


Indie Authors/Publishers

From Book Sirens
From Novel Cause
From Novel Cause
From Author
From Author
From Author

NetGalley