Get Rec’d with Amanda – Volume 18

Hi there! Hello!

It’s time for another edition of Get Rec’d, where I discuss some of my more recent book recommendations I’ve given out to bookstore customers and reading buds.

This time, I’ve also included a recommendation I’ve received. Love getting those!

Have you gotten some good recs lately?

  • A River Enchanted

    A River Enchanted by Rebecca Ross

    Hand-sold this one this week! This is Rebecca Ross’s debut adult fantasy romance and has some childhood rivals to lovers romance vibes.

    House of Earth and Blood meets The Witch’s Heart in Rebecca Ross’s brilliant first adult fantasy, set on the magical isle of Cadence where two childhood enemies must team up to discover why girls are going missing from their clan.

    Jack Tamerlaine hasn’t stepped foot on Cadence in ten long years, content to study music at the mainland university. But when young girls start disappearing from the isle, Jack is summoned home to help find them. Enchantments run deep on Cadence: gossip is carried by the wind, plaid shawls can be as strong as armor, and the smallest cut of a knife can instill fathomless fear. The capricious spirits that rule the isle by fire, water, earth, and wind find mirth in the lives of the humans who call the land home. Adaira, heiress of the east and Jack’s childhood enemy, knows the spirits only answer to a bard’s music, and she hopes Jack can draw them forth by song, enticing them to return the missing girls.

    As Jack and Adaira reluctantly work together, they find they make better allies than rivals as their partnership turns into something more. But with each passing song, it becomes apparent the trouble with the spirits is far more sinister than they first expected, and an older, darker secret about Cadence lurks beneath the surface, threatening to undo them all.

    With unforgettable characters, a fast-paced plot, and compelling world building, A River Enchanted is a stirring story of duty, love, and the power of true partnership, and marks Rebecca Ross’s brilliant entry on the adult fantasy stage.

    Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

    This book is available from:
    • Available at Amazon
    • Order this book from apple books

    • Barnes & Noble
    • Kobo

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    We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks!

    A River Enchanted by Rebecca Ross

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  • Barely Functional Adult

    Barely Functional Adult by Meichi Ng

    I love recommend this one to people who love graphic novel-style memoirs like Hyperbole and a Half or love funny, autobiographical comics like Sarah’s Scribbles.

    From the creator of Barely Functional Adult, a painfully relatable webcomic with over 125k followers on Instagram, comes a hilariously poignant collection of beautifully illustrated short stories that chronicle the ever-evolving perspectives of your twenties on work, therapy, identity, heartbreak, friendship, and more.

    Wielding her trademark balance of artful humor, levity, and heartbreaking introspection, Meichi Ng’s indisputably relatable collection of short stories holds a mirror to our past, present, and future selves.

    Featuring a swaddled, gender-neutral, Barely Functional Adult as its protagonist, who says all the things we think but cannot say, this book is equal parts humorous and heartbreaking as it spans a spectrum of topics including imposter syndrome, therapy, friendships, first loves, letting go of exes, and just trying to find your purpose in the world. Prepare to excitedly shove this book in your friend’s face with little decorum as you shout, “THIS IS SO US!”

    In this beautiful, four-color collection compiled completely of never-before-seen content, Meichi perfectly captures the best and worst of us in every short story, allowing us to weep with pleasure at our own fallibility. Hilarious, relatable, and heart-wrenchingly honest, Barely Functional Adult will have you laughing and crying in the same breath, and taking solace in the fact that we’re anything but alone in this world

    Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

    This book is available from:
    • Available at Amazon
    • Order this book from apple books

    • Barnes & Noble
    • Kobo

    As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
    We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks!

    Barely Functional Adult by Meichi Ng

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  • Modern Tarot

    Modern Tarot by Michelle Tea

    This one was recommended to me! I started doing single card tarot pulls throughout the week and I love consulting this book to help interpret the cards. Super easy to understand!

    The beloved literary iconoclast delivers a fresh twenty-first century primer on tarot that can be used with any deck.

    While tarot has gone mainstream with a diverse range of tarot decks widely available, there has been no equally mainstream guide to the tarot—one that can be applied to any deck—until now. Infused with beloved iconoclastic author Michelle Tea’s unique insight, inviting pop sensibility, and wicked humor, Modern Tarot is a fascinating journey through the cards that teaches how to use this tradition to connect with our higher selves.

    Whether you’re a committed seeker or a digital-age skeptic—or perhaps a little of both—Tea’s essential guide opens the power of tarot to you. Modern Tarot doesn’t require you to believe in the supernatural or narrowly focus on the tarot as a divination tool. Tea instead provides incisive descriptions of each of the 78 cards in the tarot system—each illustrated in the charmingly offbeat style of cartoonist Amanda Verwey—and introduces specially designed card-based rituals that can be used with any deck to guide you on a path toward radical growth and self-improvement.

    Tea reveals how tarot offers moments of deep, transformative connection—an affirming, spiritual experience that is gentle, individual, and aspirational. Grounded in Tea’s twenty-five years of tarot wisdom and her abiding love of the cards, and featuring 78 black and white illustrations throughout, Modern Tarot is the ultimate introduction to the tradition of the tarot for millennial readers.

    Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

    This book is available from:
    • Available at Amazon
    • Order this book from apple books

    • Barnes & Noble
    • Kobo

    As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
    We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks!

    Modern Tarot by Michelle Tea

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  • Say Nothing

    Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

    This is one of my go-to “dad books” to recommend, especially of a customer wants a paperback option, though you don’t have to be a dad to enjoy it.

    In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs. They never saw her again. Her abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it. In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville’s children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress–with so many kids, she had always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes.

    Patrick Radden Keefe’s mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders. From radical and impetuous I.R.A. terrorists such as Dolours Price, who, when she was barely out of her teens, was already planting bombs in London and targeting informers for execution, to the ferocious I.R.A. mastermind known as The Dark, to the spy games and dirty schemes of the British Army, to Gerry Adams, who negotiated the peace but betrayed his hardcore comrades by denying his I.R.A. past–Say Nothing conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish.

    Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

    This book is available from:
    • Available at Amazon
    • Order this book from apple books

    • Barnes & Noble
    • Kobo

    As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
    We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks!

    Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

    View Book Info Page

Comments are Closed

  1. Qualisign says:

    A book that I made three relatives (all with PhDs) purchase — and read! — this week is Benjamin Labatut’s WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD. It’s an incredible genre mash-up of 19th and 20th C ‘history’ of some key individuals who changed mathematics and physics; it’s a psychological horror show; it’s an unimaginable fiction with probable real world outcomes. [Rather like how the events of 2016 could not be imagined and yet they occurred and changed the world in horrifying ways.] The book was shortlisted in 2021 for the Booker Prize. I listened to it first as an audiobook and immediately purchased it in hardback. Talk about genre bending. NOT romance. TW for mental breakdowns all over the place.

  2. Julia says:

    I think Rebecca Ross is a really talented writer and thoroughly enjoyed A River Enchanted. At this point I’ll basically read anything she puts out.

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