ashleyholstrom's Reviews (1.38k)

The spice! Is immaculate! What happens when a WASP moves to LA and ends up rooming with a porn star? This beautiful, sex-positive book, that’s what. The Roommate is so fun. Just read it.

✨ From The Books I Liked Best in 2023 at Crooked Reads.

Y’all. This book is an absolute masterpiece. It’s a memoir about queer domestic abuse and writing and how to exist in the world, but it’s not a straight-forward book of prose. Most chapters are a page long and focus on a single moment in time, with footnotes pointing to the parallels of her life to classic folktale themes. It’s told in the second person, putting you right in the middle of the messy story. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read.

✨ From The Books I Liked Best in 2023 at Crooked Reads.

You know when you pick up a book and it’s the perfect thing for the exact season you’re in? That’s what this was for me. The amount of annotating in my copy…is a lot. Tara woke up on her birthday one year and decided to make a change. And she actually fucking DID it. In Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies, she shares the rituals and journaling practices that helped her make a better, happier life for herself. The ultimate kindness!

✨ From The Books I Liked Best in 2023 at Crooked Reads.

A Sam Irby slam dunk. (A Sam dunk??) I do not care a lick about Sex and the City, but I cackled through the large chunk of the book focused on the series. I also appreciated getting more vulnerable stories than Irby’s shared with us before. If you’re into snark and dark humor and poop tales, Quietly Hostile is for you. Best experienced on audio, read by the author!

✨ From The Books I Liked Best in 2023 at Crooked Reads.

We all know Elle Kennedy is the queen of hockey romance. This one features the daughter of Hannah and Garrett, from The Deal, and is basically perfect. The grumpiest of grumpy meets sunshine with two A-list college hockey players, each battling their reputations—Ryder for that time he broke a guy’s jaw, Gigi for being the daughter of an NHL superstar. The spice in this book is top-notch and the relationship felt more realistic than in a lot of other romances.

✨ From The Books I Liked Best in 2023 at Crooked Reads.

This reads like a YA novel, but it’s a memoir. It wasn’t my favorite, but it was so comforting to find. It’s especially great to have it told through the eyes of a teenager, because most sufferers begin as teens.

A passage that resonated with me, and still gives me goosebumps: “When I stared at the mirror and tried to recognize the girl without eyebrows, eyelashes, and bangs as myself and failed, I knew something had gone horribly wrong. It’s hard to recognize yourself when you’ve pulled at your eyebrows so consistently that there is almost nothing left. It’s hard to believe you could have done something so destructive to your face, and that tomorrow you have to go to school pretending nothing is different.”

Yeah. That could have been pulled (heh) from my journals.

Part of A Trichy Pull-List: Best Books on Compulsive Hair-Pulling at Book Riot.

My BFF found this in a Little Free Library and scooped it up for me, which I guess is a sign that maybe I’ve been conveying my weird nesting habits for longer than I thought I had.

It’s broken up into a bunch of categories, like grooming, cleaning, decorating, and entertaining. Each section has tips on other uses for things like vinegar or lemon, or must-haves in your kitchen/office/closet. It looks great on my kitchen hutch and is so lovely to have on hand for minor nesting emergencies.

From Genre Kryptonite: Books about Nesting at Book Riot.

Written for therapists, this book is excellent. Being read by a patient (?) is a little odd. It gives practice conversations between clinician and patient. It's heavy in statistics on things like type of hair and age of puller. Interesting stuff.