📖 Get A Life, Chloe Brown

✏️ Talia Hibbert

📍The Midlands, UK

👥 Chloe “Button” Brown. Redford “Red” Morgan.

📎 Romance

“Bliss should be held onto with both hands.”

This actually took me a bit of work to get into. I’d find myself having to go back and re-read sections as my mind wandered. BUT once it got going I was really invested.

Chloe Sophia Brown is one of my favourite female leads in a long time. She’s fierce, sassy, together (even though the entire premise of this read is that she’s not) and so beautiful. Red sees through all of the walls she has built up as she tries to navigate a life of chronic pain. It’s messy, spicy, cute, relatable, funny and I loved it.

📖 Alone In Berlin
✏️ Hans Fallada
📍Berlin, 1940-1943
👥 Otto & Anna Quangel
📎 Historical Fiction

“Conviviality, booze, cheerful relaxation after the heavy effort of torturing and putting to death their fellow men.”

Based on a true story from wartime Berlin, Otto and Anna Quangel discover their only son has been killed in action, setting in motion their own campaign of resistance against Nazi rule.

This book is a tough read. It’s long, sprawling and graphic in its content. But it was a graphic time and Hans Fallada doesn’t shy away from that. I felt outrage and hopelessness reading it - and that was safe in the knowledge that this regime fell a couple of years later. The people living through this didn’t have that luxury.