Scribblemarks

2026 Book #22: Lord of the Flies

Book: Lord of the Flies
Author: William Golding
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟

Completed this for the 52 Book Club Challenge Prompt #16 (Deux Ex Machina).

A group of boys is stranded on an empty island after a plane crash.

At first, it is all fun and games, and then it is briefly orderly. But before long, all descends into chaos and darkness.

2026 Book #21: The Fifth Season

Book: The Fifth Season
Author: N.K. Jemisin
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟1/2

Completed this for the 52 Book Club Reading Challenge #20 (Title in a serif font).

This is the way the world ends. For the last time.

Essun comes home to find out that her husband has murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter.

2026 Book #20: Such Sharp Teeth

Book: Such Sharp Teeth
Author: Rachel Harrison
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Completed this for the Popsugar Reading Challenge Prompt #20 (A book with a character who does Pilates or Lagree) and the 52 Book Club Challenge Prompt #35 (A character with a secret identity).

Rory Morris has moved back to her hometown to help her pregnant twin sister, Scarlett. It’s supposed to be temporary.

But when she hits a large animal with her car and goes stumbling out into the darkness, she is attacked. And now nothing will ever be the same.

2026 Book #19: The Pearl Sister

Book: The Pearl Sister Sister
Author: Lucinda Riley
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟

CeCe, like all of her sisters, struggles after her adoptive father – Pa Salt – dies.

The clues he leaves her take her across the globe to Australia, and to a bloodline that starts with Kitty McBride, the daughter of a Scottish clergyman.

2026 Book #18: The Shadow Sister

Book: The Shadow Sister
Author: Lucinda Riley
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟 1/4

Completed this for the Popsugar Reading Challenge Prompt #15 (A book about new beginnings).

Star D’Alpièse is struggling. Filled with grief at the death of her father, she suddenly finds herself needing space from her sister CeCe, with whom she’s always been close.

When she starts looking at the clues that Pa Salt has left her about her birth, her journey takes her even further away from CeCe and the life she has known.

2026 Book #17: Zero Stars, Do Not Recommend

Book: Zero Stars, Do Not Recommend
Author: M.J. Wassmer
Rating:

Completed this for the Popsugar Reading Challenge Prompt #4 (A book that starts with the letter Z) and the 52 Book Club Reading Challenge Prompt #8 (A three-syllable word in the title).

Dan Foster – an underachiever with chronically low self-esteem, is finally taking a vacation with his girlfriend Mara.

Everything is going great until the sun explodes, and the world is plunged into darkness.

2026 Book #16: Hotel du Lac

Book: Hotel du Lac
Author: Anita Brookner
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟 1/2 Stars

Read for a book club in January.

Edith Hope, a writer of romantic stories, and stubbornly single, has been exiled to the Hotel du Lac for embarrassing herself in front of her friends.

We don’t yet know what she has done, but we do know her thoughts as she arrives at the Swiss hotel.

2026 Book #13: The Seven Sisters

Book: The Seven Sisters
Author: Lucinda Riley
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟

Completed this for the Popsugar Reading Challenge Prompt #3 (A book you meant to read in 2025) and the 52 Book Club Reading Challenge Prompt #28 (from a series at least eight books long).

Maia D’Apliese has just lost her adoptive father, Pa Salt. She and her five sisters (all adopted) reunite at their family home, and each of them are given a clue as to where they came from.

Maia’s clue takes her across the Atlantic to Brazil.

2026 Book #14: Holding

Book: Holding
Author: Graham Norton
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟

Duneen is a remote Irish village with its fair share of drama. Sergeant PJ Collins, feels himself perennially underestimated and ignored because of his weight, Brid Riordan is walking the fine line between enthusiastic drinker and alcoholic, and Evelyn Ross has spent her entire life stuck because of something that happened years ago.

When human remains are discovered and linked to a man connected to both Brid and Evelyn’s past, PJ finds himself doing serious police work for the very first time.

And a lot of secrets will come to the surface.

2026 Book #12: 84, Charing Cross Road

Book: 84, Charing Cross Road
Author: Helene Hanff
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Completed this for the Popsugar Reading Challenge Prompt #47 (A book told entirely through letters) and the 52 Book Club Reading Challenge Prompt #49 (from the 800s of the Dewey Decimal System).

An epistolary memoir consisting of letters exchanged between Helene Hanff and Frank Doel of Marks & Co booksellers, 84 Charing Cross Road is a beautiful story of a platonic friendship built on a love of books, which spills out into other areas of their lives.