Review: Every Missing Girl - Book #2 Kendall Beck Series - Leanne Kale Sparks - February 2023 So, this book was one of those that I forgot I had gotten from Netgalley and ended up reading it on my phone with the Libby library App as it sounded like a good book. Every Missing Girl by Leanne Kale Sparks was a good mystery thriller overall. There were parts that I felt the novel did get a tad too busy especially when we had the overlap of the two incidents from the initial grocery store shooting and the kidnapped little girl and then later on Detective Adam Taylor's niece Frankie going missing.  I felt that the story tried to chuck the two cases and blend them in to work together, but it just felt too busy and somewhere in the mix - the jump between the two cases made the original one feel lost, and then when we do find out the reason why Frankie vanished, it was like a whole new storyline and then that ending was not what I had expected as often with mystery thrillers readers get a...

Review: Concrete Rose - Book # 0 - THUG Series - Angie Thomas - January 2021 Going into this book, I had mixed feelings because of the previous two titles I have read from Angie Thomas. The first which was related to this book was The Hate U Give, I happened to have read the ARC of this book back in April 2017 and what made it more powerful was that particular day, I sat in the backseat with two of my US friends as we drove from Texas to Atlanta. I remember us stopping at the White Castle in Montgomery, Alabama, and on the TV was the shooting of Jordan Edwards who was a black 17-year-old boy shot by a white cop. It struck me as living in New Zealand, wasn't something we saw happen as we don't have guns really in New Zealand. They are seen as a last resort and it broke my heart and made reading the book more powerful and an emotional journey. Then a few years later, the author published On the Come Up which sadly was a DNF for me. When I saw Concrete Rose being published, I ...

Review: Friends Til' The End - Book #6 Good Girlz Series - ReShonda Tate Billingsley - February 2009. Back in 2007-2009, I started a great YA Christian series set with a strong African-American / Hispanic feel to it. That series was called Good Girlz by ReShonda Tate Billingsley. As many readers of my reviews will know, this year I made the goal to try and read some of my older books off my devices. As I was scrolling through, I came across ReShonda Tate Billingsley's books of the Good Girlz. I clicked into Friends Til the End and was instantly reunited with the characters of Jasmine, Angel, Camille, and Alexis and their youth group leader Rachel. In Friends Til' the End we mainly focus on Jasmine as she is caught in a Romeo and Juliet situation when her boyfriend's twin brother is accused of shooting Jasmine's brother. Jasmine's brother was clean and on his way to big things until his life was drastically cut short. Now Jasmine is torn between her love of CJ...