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BethMcD 🧚🏼‍♀️

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BethMcD is Currently Reading

BethMcD 🧚🏼‍♀️ is currently reading

Shark Heart

by Emily Habeck (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: 2024, currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in October 2024

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BethMcD 🧚🏼‍♀️ said: " What a fucking beautiful book. This is my new number one. This is my dessert island book. I’m ruined for all other love stories. 😭

A few favorite quotes:

“Wren saw now how passion was delicate and temporary, a visitor, a feeling that would come and go What a fucking beautiful book. This is my new number one. This is my dessert island book. I’m ruined for all other love stories. 😭

A few favorite quotes:

“Wren saw now how passion was delicate and temporary, a visitor, a feeling that would come and go. Feelings fled under pressure, feelings did not light the darkness. What remained strong in the deep, the hard times, was love as an effort, a doing, a conscious act of will. Soulmates, like her and Lewis, were not theoretical and found. They were tangible, built.”

“The main ingredient in transformation was not magic. It was pain.”

“So maybe love wasn’t an unwieldy accessory in times of peril. May be it was the key to survival.”

“Wren no longer sees life as a linear ladder with a beginning, middle and end. Instead she considers how life is like a spiraling trail up a mountain. Each circling lap represents a learning cycle, the same lesson at a slightly high elevation. Wren realizes that she like to rest as much as she likes to climb. She begins to enjoy the view.”

This love story is unique and heartbreaking in its perspective. This story follows Wren as she persists through grief and the loss of her husband. It was painful and beautiful and hard to describe. The writing is done through prose and poems and scripts. There are pages with lots of space that allow the reader to have space to digest and sit with the strong emotions that are evoked. This review will not do this book justice at all, but I’ll try.

The premise seems strange at first but the writing style and poignant observations made about life and love and grief and pain are so artful and well done. I laughed and cried and cried some more. Not only is Lewis’ transformation discussed in the first part of the book, but in the second part we see Angela’s (Wren’s mother) story. Her trauma is discussed and sheds light onto the generational trauma and childhood experiences that shaped Wren and shape all of us.

The final part really tied things up nicely and showed that even through loss there can be joy and light and rebirth.

I think this is the best read of the year for me. I’m not sure if anything will be able to top it.

20/10: highly highly recommend to everyone. ...more "

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(page 263 of 416)
— Oct 18, 2025 12:04PM

Oct 24, 2024 08:44AM · see review

BethMcD 🧚🏼‍♀️ is currently reading

The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Freedoms in Sex and Love

by Janet W. Hardy

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— Oct 06, 2025 11:22AM

Sep 03, 2025 06:17AM

BethMcD’s Notes & Highlights

Book cover for The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab

15 highlights

The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price. ...more

See BethMcD 🧚🏼‍♀️’s 10 books with notes and highlights…

BethMcD’s Quotes

“But memory and time aren’t friends. They reject each other, they hurry in opposite directions, pulling the binding taut between them, threatening to snap. They fight, and we inexplicably lose. Memory and time. Always losing one as you go on with the other.”
― Raven Kennedy, Gild

2 likes

“Inconceivable!” “You keep using that word!” the Spaniard snapped. “I don’t think it means what you think it does.”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride

1 likes

“Ideas are wilder than memories.”
― V.E. Schwab

2 likes

“I keep listening, my ears trained to the sound of repeated bombings, and I feel a strange closeness with Gaza, as well as a desire to hear the shelling from nearby, and to touch motes of dust from the buildings being bombed. The absence of dust brings an awareness of how profoundly far I am from anything familiar, and how impossible it will be to return.”
― Adania Shibli, Minor Detail

2 likes