#Spell the Month in Books # November 2021

This meme was originally created by Jana from Reviews From the Stacks, but I first saw it on Carla’s blog (Carla Loves to Read).

For this challenge, use the first letter of each book title to spell the current month (skipping articles such as A or The). You can either use titles from your tbr or books that you have read/reviewed.

Jana has created a formal linkup which she posts on the second Saturday of the current month. She also has a theme for each of these lists, although you are absolutely free not to follow it at all.

Here is my list for November:

N The Night Shift by Alex Finlay

It’s New Year’s Eve, 1999. Y2K is expected to bring tragedy: planes falling from the sky, elevators plunging to earth, world markets collapsing. None of that happens. But at a Blockbuster Video in Linden, New Jersey, four teenage girls working late at the store are attacked. Only one inexplicably survives. Police quickly identify a suspect, the boyfriend of one of the victims, who flees and is never seen again.

Fifteen years later, four more teenage girls are attacked at an ice cream store in Linden, and again only one makes it out alive.

In the aftermath of the latest crime, three lives intersect: the lone survivor of the Blockbuster massacre who’s forced to relive the horrors of her tragedy; the brother of the fugitive accused, who’s convinced the police have the wrong suspect; and the FBI agent who must delve into the secrets of the both nights—stirring up memories of teen love and lies—to uncover the truth about both crimes.

O O Beautiful by Jung Yun

Written in Jung Yun’s gorgeous and precise prose, O Beautiful follows Elinor Hanson, a Korean-American journalist and former model who, as the novel opens, is embarking on her first major magazine assignment to the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota, a small town two hours from where she and her sister grew up. Elinor’s career as a freelance writer is just getting off the ground, after she booked modeling jobs for as long as she could. When her former graduate school mentor Richard hands off this potentially career-changing article with the prestigious Standard, she assumes it’s because of her North Dakota history. But as the novel develops a deeper story unspools about Richard, and the town itself, as the novel elegantly explores issues of race and gender through Elinor’s eyes. Woven throughout is the story of a missing woman, whose disappearance raises dark questions of a boomtown overrun with men and “outsiders.” As she delves deeper into her assignment, Elinor also must confront her own troubled family history and her own place in a beautiful, but troubled land.

V The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?

Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

E An Eye for an Eye by Carol Wyer

DI Kate Young is on leave. She’s the force’s best detective, but her bosses know she’s under pressure, on medication and overcoming trauma. So after her bad judgement call leads to a narrowly averted public disaster, they’re sure all she needs is a rest.

But when Staffordshire Police summon her back to work on a murder case, it’s a harder, more suspicious Kate Young who returns. With a new ruthlessness, she sets about tracking down a clinical, calculating serial killer who is torturing victims and leaving clues to taunt the police. Spurred on by her reporter husband, Young begins to suspect that the murderer might be closer than she ever imagined.

As she works to uncover the truth, Young unravels a network of secrets and lies, with even those closest to her having something to hide. But with her own competence—and her grip on reality—called into question, can she unmask the killer before they strike again?

M The Midnight Lie by Marie Rutkoski

Set in the world of the New York Times–bestselling Winner’s Curse, Marie Rutkoski returns with an epic LGBTQ fantasy romance about learning to free oneself from our rules for ourselves.

Where Nirrim lives, crime abounds, a harsh tribunal rules, and society’s pleasures are reserved for the High Kith. Life in the Ward is grim and punishing. People of her low status are forbidden from sampling sweets or wearing colors. You either follow the rules, or pay a tithe and suffer the consequences.

Nirrim keeps her head down, and a dangerous secret close to her chest.

But then she encounters Sid, a rakish traveler from far away, who whispers rumors that the High Kith possesses magic. Sid tempts Nirrim to seek that magic for herself. But to do that, Nirrim must surrender her old life. She must place her trust in this sly stranger who asks, above all, not to be trusted.

B Bound by Firelight by Dana Swift

After a magical eruption devastates the kingdom of Belwar, royal heir Adraa is falsely accused of masterminding the destruction and forced to stand trial in front of her people, who see her as a monster. Adraa’s punishment? Imprisonment in the Dome, an impenetrable, magic-infused fortress filled with Belwar’s nastiest criminals—many of whom Adraa put there herself. And they want her to pay.
 
Jatin, the royal heir to Naupure, has been Adraa’s betrothed, nemesis, and fellow masked vigilante…but now he’s just a boy waiting to ask her the biggest question of their lives. First, though, he’s going to have to do the impossible: break Adraa out of the Dome. And he won’t be able to do it without help from the unlikeliest of sources—a girl from his past with a secret that could put them all at risk.
 
Time is running out, and the horrors Adraa faces in the Dome are second only to the plot to destabilize and destroy their kingdoms. But Adraa and Jatin have saved the world once already…. Now, can they save themselves?

E Elektra by Jennifer Saint

A spellbinding reimagining of the story of Elektra, one of Greek mythology’s most infamous heroines, from the author of the beloved international bestseller, Ariadne

Three women, tangled in an ancient curse.

When Clytemnestra marries Agamemnon, she ignores the insidious whispers about his family line, the House of Atreus. But when, on the eve of the Trojan War, Agamemnon betrays Clytemnestra in the most unimaginable way, she must confront the curse that has long ravaged their family.

In Troy, Princess Cassandra has the gift of prophecy, but carries a curse of her own: no one will ever believe what she sees. When she is shown what will happen to her beloved city when Agamemnon and his army arrives, she is powerless to stop the tragedy from unfolding.

Elektra, Clytemnestra and Agamemnon’s youngest daughter, wants only for her beloved father to return home from war. But can she escape her family’s bloody history, or is her destiny bound by violence, too?

R The Resting Place by Camilla Sten

A spine-chilling, propulsive psychological suspense from international sensation Camilla Sten.

The medical term is prosopagnosia. The average person calls it face blindness—the inability to recognize a familiar person’s face, even the faces of those closest to you.

When Eleanor walked in on the scene of her capriciously cruel grandmother, Vivianne’s, murder, she came face to face with the killer—a maddening expression that means nothing to someone like her. With each passing day, her anxiety mounts. The dark feelings of having brushed by a killer, yet not know who could do this—or if they’d be back—overtakes both her dreams and her waking moments, thwarting her perception of reality.
Then a lawyer calls. Vivianne has left her a house—a looming estate tucked away in the Swedish woods. The place her grandfather died, suddenly. A place that has housed a dark past for over fifty years.

Eleanor. Her steadfast boyfriend, Sebastian. Her reckless aunt, Veronika. The lawyer. All will go to this house of secrets, looking for answers. But as they get closer to bringing the truth to light, they’ll wish they had never come to disturb what rests there.

A heart-thumping, relentless thriller that will shake you to your core, The Resting Place is an unforgettable novel of horror and suspense.

What book titles woud you use to spell NOVEMBER?