Get Rec’d with Amanda – Volume 32

Welcome back! This is the last Get Rec’d of 2022. While I do plan to continue the series, I always want to thank everyone for commenting on these posts. It seems that you all enjoy them as much as I do. I hope I’ve added some interesting books to your TBR piles or helped find a perfect rec for a fellow book lover in your circle.

As always, tell me the book recommendations you’ve received or even some you’ve given recently!

• The Hole

  

  I have two dear friends who love works in translation and this seems like a mix of creepy and tense. It has been compared to Misery after all. (Also not to be confused with a creepy Japanese novel of the same name.)

  Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. “A Korean take on Misery.” —Time Magazine, “Top 10 Thrillers to Read This Summer”

  In this tense, gripping novel by a rising star of Korean literature, Oghi has woken from a coma after causing a devastating car accident that took his wife’s life and left him paralyzed and badly disfigured. His caretaker is his mother-in-law, a widow grieving the loss of her only child. Oghi is neglected and left alone in his bed. His world shrinks to the room he lies in and his memories of his troubled relationship with his wife, a sensitive, intelligent woman who found all of her life goals thwarted except for one: cultivating the garden in front of their house. But soon Oghi notices his mother-in-law in the abandoned garden, uprooting what his wife had worked so hard to plant and obsessively digging larger and larger holes. When asked, she answers only that she is finishing what her daughter started.

  A bestseller in Korea, award-winning author Hye-young Pyun’s The Hole is a superbly crafted and deeply unnerving novel about the horrors of isolation and neglect in all of its banal and brutal forms. As Oghi desperately searches for a way to escape, he discovers the difficult truth about his wife and the toll their life together took on her.

  “A masterwork of suspense, and a profound meditation on grief, solitude, and secrecy. At once unsettling and richly moving, The Hole is vital novel, a gift from a wildly inventive writer.” —Laura van den Berg, author of I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

  Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

  This book is available from:

  • 
  
  
  • 
  • 

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

  The Hole by Pyun Hye-Young

  View Book Info Page

• On a Sunbeam

  

  For the graphic novel lover in your life (even if that happens to be you!). There’s scifi and a queer, tender love story.

  Throughout the deepest reaches of space, a crew rebuilds beautiful and broken-down structures, painstakingly putting the past together. As new member Mia gets to know her team, the story flashes back to her pivotal year in boarding school, where she fell in love with a mysterious new student. Soon, though, Mia reveals her true purpose for joining their ship—to track down her long-lost love.

  An inventive world, a breathtaking love story, and stunning art come together in this new work by award-winning artist Tillie Walden.

  Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

  This book is available from:

  • 
  
  
  • 
  • 

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

  On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden

  View Book Info Page

• Seeing Ghosts

  

  I recommend this one a lot to anyone who devoured Crying in H-Mart by Michelle Zauner. Lots of similar themes of identity and parental relationships.

  For readers of Helen Macdonald and Elizabeth Alexander, an intimate and haunting portrait of grief and the search for meaning from a singular new talent as told through the prism of three generations of her Chinese American family.
  
  Born two years after the only son in her family died just hours after his birth, Kat Chow became unusually fixated with death. She worried constantly about her parents dying-especially her mother, a vivacious and mischievous woman. One morning when Kat was nine, her mother casually made a morbid joke: When she eventually dies, she says laughing, she’d like to be stuffed and displayed in Kat’s future apartment in order to always watch over her.

  Four years later when her mother died unexpectedly from cancer, Kat, her two older sisters and their father are plunged into a debilitating, lonely grief. With a distinct voice that is wry and heartfelt, Kat weaves together what is part ghost story and part excavation of her family’s history of loss spanning three generations and their immigration from China and Hong Kong to America and Cuba. This redemptive coming-of-age story uncovers the uncanny parallels in Kat’s lineage, including the strength of sisterhood and the complicated duty of looking after parents, even after death.

  Seeing Ghosts asks what it means to claim and tell your family’s story: Is writing an exorcism or is it its own form of preservation? What do we owe in our grief, and how does it shape us? In order to answer these questions and to understand her family’s ghosts, Kat unearths their loss and challenges the power structures of race, class and gender. The result is an extraordinary new contribution to the literature of grief and the American family, and a provocative and transformative meditation on who we become under the specter of loss.

  Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

  This book is available from:

  • 
  
  
  • 
  • 

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

  Seeing Ghosts by Kat Chow

  View Book Info Page

• Signs & Skymates

  

  My lovely partner revealed last week that their brother had planned on getting me a gift, so I went to full on panic mode. My friend Tildy helped me pick this one out, along with a corresponding astrology deck.

  Signs & Skymates is your ultimate guide to astrological compatibility—from romance to self-love—from star astrologer and founder of @ScorpioMystique and KnowTheZodiac Dossé-Via Trenou. 

  Get to know yourself, your partner(s), and your friendships through the full constellation of your astrological self! In Signs & Skymates West African astrologer Dossé-Via Trenou uses her signature whole-chart approach to reveal how your Sun, Moon, Rising, Mercury, Venus, and Mars signs contribute to astrological compatibility—and serve as the basis for romantic and platonic relationships, as well as your all-important relationship with yourself.

  Using astrology as a guiding light in her evolutionary approach to compatibility, Dossé-Via invites you to connect to your innermost self, and others, in new and more expansive ways. Through chapters on the role of each chart placement, as well as comprehensive explorations of relationships between different signs, Signs & Skymates dismantles ideas of which signs “go together,” encouraging readers to expand their ideas about each sign—including the ones in their own chart. Discover the joys, challenges, and opportunities in your relationships as you deepen your knowledge of Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces.

  Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

  This book is available from:

  • 
  
  
  • 
  • 

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

  Signs & Skymates by Dossé-Via Trenou

  View Book Info Page