BOOKLIST THURSDAY 5 ⭐️ PREDICTIONS | The Books Everyone Has Read But Me! But Are They 5 Stars?

five-star prediction video it's like a boomerang nope that's a lie i haven't talked about the one i just finished in april always late to the party which i call it cat earring so our main character whose name we ended five or if you've read the book seven hi everybody it's audrey and welcome back to chapter and converse today's video is to be the five star prediction video aftermath in which i tell you if the five books that i picked are actually five star predictions so if you are new to my channel or maybe you just missed that video here's a quick uh previously on chapter and converse but way way way way back in january i was invited by sarah from sarah's nightstand and lindsey from lindsay's little library to join their bookless thursday five star prediction and i will link both of their channels down below so if you are watching me first and haven't checked them out yet definitely do that and if you are here because you saw their videos welcome to my channel and i have to say if you haven't seen my original video i'll just tell you guys now i was so excited and so flattered that they reached out to me and asked me to join them on their bookless thursday five star prediction i have been a fan of both of theirs since my discovery of booktube days and before i was even making videos and i'm super grateful over the course of this we've gotten to know each other and become friends and it's just been such a great experience so i've already recapped four of these five books in monthly wrap-ups i just finished the final book in april so you guys already know some of my thoughts feelings and all that other good stuff about it but here we're gonna dive in and i'm gonna give you final verdicts if they are five stars so i'm gonna talk about the books in the order that i actually read them and the first book i read was the sundown motel by simone st james and i loved it you guys five stars i'm a fan i immediately picked up the broken girls and i haven't read it yet but i'm going to but i totally enjoyed this book and i totally get all the hype around it and i get why everybody was reading it and talking about it and raving about it because i just loved it and i loved so many different things about this book so it's dual timelines dual points of view so we've got a mystery in the past a mystery in the presence there's like all the things that i love in a book happen in this book and we have 1982 and then we have 2017. so back in 1982 viv takes the overnight clerk position at the sundown motel in upstate new york and she was on her way to new york city gets a little bit derailed and winds up kind of you know having to get herself a job in the small town and while she kind of figures out what's what and then in 2017 carly's mom passes away and her mom was viv's sister and curly has always been obsessed with the story of viv because viv mysteriously disappeared and her mom would never talk about it so after carly's mom passes away she finds herself really kind of lost and untethered and she decides to try to figure out what happened to her aunt so she goes to that town upstate new york where the sun motel still exists and she starts to investigate what happened to her aunt and part of that investigation includes taking a job at the sundown motel so one of the things that i love did i already say one of the things that i loved another thing that i loved about this book is that it's a full-on ghost story and you know it out of the get-go so this is not like a riley sager riverdale is it supernatural is it not supernatural i'm not quite sure and no shade i love both of those love riverdale you guys know i love riley sager but this is more like nancy drew straight up there's some ghosty stuff happening here and i am not usually one for the ghost story but i fell for it hook like and sinker like i was all in for this book that said this was not a book that i would recommend reading before bed if you are a little bit impacted by ghosty things because this is definitely one of those books where i was like oh this is like totally safe i can totally read this at night and then like something would happen and i would be like nope nope nope nope nope gotta put it down gotta put it down so this became a daytime read for me but if you have a thicker skin or not as new to the genre you might be cool at night with this book but i loved it it was it was twisty i loved the mysteries and again another thing that i loved about this book but it is just jam-packed with so many just fierce fabulous female characters there's so many strong interesting of just amazing women in this and that was probably one of the things i loved the absolute most i felt so connected not just to viv and carly but to the whole supporting cast of characters in both timelines and i was in like i was wholly invested this book got me from the start it was not a book i wanted to put down and if you have not picked it up you're missing out definitely get this book the next book i read is a man called uve by frederick bachmann and i have read beartown and us against you by frederick bachman and i absolutely love them i'm obsessed with them i cannot wait for book number three to come out and i have had so many people recommend this book to me and this is like the unpopular opinion i didn't love it this kind of was like a three for me and i know i know i know i know i know i know i can already hear it because when i talked about it in my monthly wrap-up people were like coming for me already so what i will say is the writing is outstanding it's beautiful frederick bachmann is beyond gifted beyond amazing he just he can spin a story and draw beautiful characters and i take nothing away from that i had a really hard time getting into this book and i understand why people like it like i get it it just wasn't for me in a lot of ways and it wasn't about like connecting with the character or anything like that but i just it was not a book that i felt compelled to pick back up again and it took me probably to like 60 or 70 percent of the book in to then like get like want to read the end of it so i eventually did hit that point but it took me a very long time and i did take a lot of people's advice and i did do the audiobook primarily i read a little bit of it but i mostly did the audiobook and the audiobook was fantastic and i definitely think that actually helped even though i'm telling you guys like i didn't always want to go back to it but it just i just found him frustrating which i know you're supposed to like i know he's the crotchety old man next door and like at the beginning like there were parts of it where i was like seeing myself in him where it was like i'm totally gonna be the crotchety old lady who's like you're parking your bike where you're not supposed to and you're not following the trash rules cause i'm already kind of that person we kind of go forwards and backwards in time so we understand how uvei became uve basically how he got to this point i would say and he just like doesn't want to be bothered with people like he doesn't want anyone to bug him and these new neighbors move in across the street and basically kind of like run over his mailbox with their moving van when they move in and just for better for worse and kind of almost through like a series of comedic events they just keep inserting themselves into his life and there are great moments and there's very heartwarming moments and i did actually tear up at the end of this book but it took me a very long time to get there and i knew it wasn't going to be beartown and i wasn't expecting it to be that i just thought i would be more pulled in by the story and ultimately it just wasn't it just wasn't for me so it wasn't bad and again i appreciate what's really good about it i just didn't really connect with it i feel like that's it i just didn't really sync up with the book and maybe my expectations were too high maybe i was expecting too much from it and maybe i was just sort of expecting to get swept away the way i was with beartown and us against you and the irony of all that being when i read beartown that was 100 like a booktube made me do it book and i did not expect anything from that book and from like page two i was like in tears over what an amazing writer he was never mind how beautiful that story was and gut wrenching and heartbreaking and hopeful and just everything but i'm glad i read it i understand why a lot of people out there love it but for me this was not five stars so the next book actually sarah lindsay and i did this as a buddy read and it's the invisible life of addie larue by v.e schwab so lindsay also had this as her five-star prediction and then when we were talking about reading it sarah was like i have a two and i want to read it so we all read it together and i have to say like i am not a buddy reader at all because i don't like to be on other people's schedules or timelines and i don't like to deviate from my moody moody reading but i am so glad we did the buddy read because it was so much fun to be able to talk about this book because there's so much to this book and just to be able to gush about it with other people who also just adored and loved this book as much as i did was such great fun so i talked about this in my march wrap up so i wound up post-it noting this book to death it's not gonna focus because i didn't want to fold over the pages which is so not my mo like you guys know i i write and i i dog ear and all this stuff but i just couldn't bring myself to do it so i was like you know what i'm gonna do i'm gonna do this and then i'm gonna buy a second copy because i'm a psychopath and that's the book that i'm going to dog ear and do all the things to but i wasn't going to buy like the exact same book no i was going to buy the uk edition because you can't have two of the same well this is actually more beautiful than the first book so not only is like the cover stunning but then the naked cover has this beautiful happenings and then the inside and then even just there's like small differences in there's not artwork in it but there's a few sketches and things but even just like the text of it so i think this is going to be my perfect perfect copy and then i'm going to wind up going back and doing something here and there's going to be another special edition coming out in october so if you haven't already figured it out five stars hands down this book is probably one of the most beautiful books in language and in words and in story that i've read and i would i would compare it not in story but in emotion and feeling and experience to what i had with bear town i cried and i just fell in love with addie and henry so if you are not familiar with this book this book is about addie and it starts in 17 18 1714 in france and she is about to get married and she just does not want to get married she doesn't want to marry this man she doesn't want that life she wants to experience life and she wants to be independent she wants to be free and she literally turns from her parents who are bringing her to the wedding and just starts to run through the woods screaming and praying and asking for help and asking for a way out and she has been warned to never pray to god to answer at night and sure enough a god answers at night and she tells him he wants to be free and he grants her wish but what she doesn't know at the time are the levels and intricacies of the deal that she has just made with this god luke who i was listening to a podcast with v.e schwab and she was like he the god that answers her prayer and answers her calling is not the devil but he is sort of one of the precursors to what eventually becomes and manifests as the devil so very interesting he is the baddest man you're ever going to meet in the woods at night so what she comes to realize is that the terms of this deal and being able to be completely free and to live forever is in exchange for the fact that no one will ever remember her ever again she goes to her parents house and they don't know who she is she goes to her best friend's house and she doesn't know who she is and she could be sitting in a cafe and order a cup of coffee and the barista leaves goes to the back to get some scones and then comes back and is like wait who are you can i help you i have no idea who you are so she has lived her entire life with nobody remembering her even though she has all of these extraordinary experiences and we fast forward 300 years and she is in living in new york city and she goes into this book shop because she is completely just obsessed and energized by and fascinated by arts and culture and books and music and she you know goes to this bookstore and gets a book and meets the guy who works at the counter named henry and then the next day she kind of does it all over again because what else is she going to do and when she goes back to the bookstore he remembers her and not knows her backstory not knows anything about her but he was like yeah you were here yesterday and her entire world just shifts and she needs to understand who henry is and why he remembers her and what's different about him and it's their story but then at the same time we go backwards in time and we see all of these sort of big memorable moments and small memorable moments that happened to addie over the 300 years before so there's like it's obviously magical realism and fantasy but there's some historical elements to it and ve schwab weaves in actual historical events with made up historical events but does it in a way that with the exception of like really obvious references to things in history it's also kind of like is this a real thing or that i just don't know about or is this not a real thing and this was a 10 years in the making story for her as well you guys know i'm obsessed with podcasts and i'm obsessed with all things authors but i feel like you can you can feel every ounce of thought and love that went into this book every word how expertly it was chosen every detail and that this was not the book that she needed or could write ten years ago or seven years ago or five years ago but it was the absolutely right book for her when she did write it and i just think it is such an incredible accomplishment and i i just loved it so much i i can't wait like all three of us like finish the book and we're like okay can we start over again like it's that kind of a book it's definitely a book i will be rereading i think you can get more and more out of it every time that you read it but you know i've heard different people say it's slow or it's this or it's that i was totally invested in the story i don't do historical fiction you guys know that like i don't gravitate towards it i don't sync up well with historical fiction it doesn't always work for me in a lot of ways and i will say i very much enjoyed the present timeline of this more but at the same time the more i got into the historical and started to understand what story v schwab was telling and the importance of it i was more invested in it as it went on so it definitely took me as like a non-historical non-classic reader a little bit to get into sort of like the rhythm and find my footing in the historical part of it but once i did i just was like so like i actually there were parts that i wish she had done more historically in certain decades than others but i just loved it so much i loved it loved it loved it so much so i have only read one other v e schwab book so i cannot comment i know even v schwab herself is like i know it's not like other books and it's a deviation for me but i think it's amazing you guys i really really do so five stars five or if you've read the book seven the next book i read was my very first stephen king and i read pet cemetery oh my god you guys i talked about this a lot in my march wrap up also but i really enjoyed this too and definitely not a book to read at night i am dipping a toe in too hard getting a little bit darker here but the ghost horror bits even though i can read really dark and messed up thrillers and i had seen this movie if you guys follow me i'm sorry i'm going to tell the same story 100 times but i saw the original movie in high school my friend's basement it scared me to pieces and it has always stuck with me and i was really intimidated to read this book so i did watch the original movie again after i read the book and i feel like i've exercised those demons even though there were parts of it that were still really creepy but this book was just so well done and i have read on writing by stephen king and i have followed a lot of his writing advice and interviews and things like that so i have a lot of respect for him as a writer but i really appreciated his writing in this book and the story and a lot of people had said you know yes there's horror and there's creep factors to this and all of that but it's also fundamentally a story about grief and that couldn't be more nail on the head and i actually got super choked up at parts of this book which i did not see coming and i got extremely freaked out and grossed out and like you had to take a step back which i did see coming but it was still not any less creepy like there were definitely some gross out points to this there was definitely some creepy points to this and i just i'm so glad i read it because i really enjoyed it so this came out how many hundreds of years ago but there's an introduction in here an author's note which is really good that explains sort of his inspiration for the story which is great but this is about dr lewis creed who moves his family to the small town in maine because he gets a job as a doctor at a university there and he's married he has two young children a daughter and then a toddler son named gabe and a cat named church and they move into this house and across the street is this older couple judd and his wife and they've lived there their whole lives so the road that is between the creed's house and judd's house across the street has all these giant trailer trucks that is always going up and down and judd has this great line about how the road has used up a lot of animals and right nearby the creed's house there is sort of this makeshift pet cemetery that for decades upon decades kids in the town have buried their pets there and when church gets a little bit used up by the road judd introduces louis to the pet cemetery and something definitely isn't quite right there and it just this book is like so wonderfully creepy but again so terrifyingly real in the sense of sort of the depths that people will go to and the places people will go to when grief starts to consume them and it's really like one heck of a ride and i've heard a lot of people say you know it's not his best work but it's not his worst work and again it's the only one i've read so from my experience a i was terrified of it because of my experience with the movie b i don't really read horror so i was scared um and see like i wasn't expecting as emotional of a draw and pull and feeling from this so i would put this at five stars for my experience and i that might change when i read more stephen king and i'm going to now bravely dip into some more stephen king i don't know where i'm going next i do have misery but i think from an enjoyment standpoint from a craft standpoint from a writing standpoint i knew a lot of the story going in because i had seen the movie but it didn't diminish the reading experience for me at all so i really loved it and i talked about this in my wrap up as well sarah had recommended the audio book because michael c hall narrates it and i actually ended up doing part of this on audio but i found for me i really wanted to read it and experience i actually like dog-eared a lot of this as well i was not afraid to dog-ear this book should i call it cat earring no um i'm being dumb so the audiobook actually is really well done and i will say that he gives such life and inflection and personality to judd that had i not seen the original movie where i was picturing you know herman munster fred quinn in it michael c hall definitely gives the judd character so much presence that i don't know that i would have had just straight up reading the book so even if you do the combo both or you lean one way or the other but yeah you can't go wrong with having dexter read you a horror book basically so i loved it i loved it and the last book i read is rebecca by daphne du maurier and i have to say you guys i am amazed that i was not spoiled for this book because this book came out in 1938 in so many books now that i've read it like i knew i've heard authors say they were inspired by it i've heard authors say that it's a retelling of this i have heard authors allude to it so many times and now that i've finished the book i'm thinking about all these books that i've read and i'm like yep there's some rebecca there yep there's some rebecca there oops now i get it and i kind of in some weird way feel like i'm in the club now like i feel like i totally get it i feel like i'm i've the curtain has been opened i've been left behind the curtain and i totally understand it i get it i totally get it now this book was tremendous and i was so nervous about it's 400 something pages it's a classic i felt like there was so much hype around it it definitely took me a little bit from like a language standpoint again kind of like the historical parts of addie to kind of find my footing and find my rhythm and i also wound up doing part of this on audiobook which definitely was really really good i'm not going to spoil any of it but if you like me did not really know much about rebecca other than mandalay and that everybody talks about it this is a story about a woman who we never actually know her name and she winds up marrying this widower max to winter and she meets him while they're in monte carlo and she is working kind of like this wealthy american not so nice woman and over the course of a couple weeks she swept off her feet by max and they wind up getting married and he brings her back to his estate mandalay in cornwall and she comes to find out that his first wife rebecca has died tragically a year ago and everyone is rather shocked that he comes back from this trip to monte carlo with a wife and some people like the housekeeper mrs danvers are downright resentful of the fact that he has brought somebody back married her and that this woman the new second mrs dewinter is trying to take rebecca's place and it's this very gothic psychological thriller mystery sort of slow burn unraveling all these different people with sort of different motivations and there's like a 20-year age gap between max to winter and the second mrs dewinter and she's very naive and she doesn't come from much and she doesn't really have sort of the same class and elegance and poise that rebecca had and she's finding it very difficult to live up to that she's finding it very difficult to stand up for herself and she's finding it very difficult to come out of rebecca's shadow and she's trying to do everything she can just to make max fall in love with her and again like i said i was not spoiled for this book so i didn't know where it was going and i didn't know what was going to happen next and i loved that about it and i really got into it pretty quickly and i kind of like gobbled it up and wanted to know i wanted to know and i loved it and of course i did what i do and i started to do a little bit of research afterwards and i'm desperate to see the alfred hitchcock movie of it which you like legit can't find anywhere like you can buy the dvd or roll the dice and hope that turner classic movie shows at some time but i went on turner and it's not showing anytime soon and i did read that they made some changes to it but it's just sort of this very creepy dark atmospheric book i feel like everybody knows sort of of the book even if you don't know the story and everybody knows the last night i dreamt i went to mandalay again opening line and i would say if you are any kind of thriller reader this is definitely a great book to read and i can't believe it took me this long to read it and i can see where it inspires other writers and where it inspires different stories and where people take little nuggets from it and i almost feel like i understand certain books more and i hesitate to say some of the books because i don't want to give anything away not that any book is like a direct ripoff of it or anything like that but it was just such a good book and i really this is a book that i really felt almost like low-key guilty about having not read before and like i really was missing out on something and i like i said i totally get it now so i five stars for sure this is definitely a book that i would read again this is a book that i also think that i will get more out of each time i read it the lasting legacy of this book is just incredible to me but i would highly recommend it and i i just think it's so beautifully done it's so well done i loved the dark gothic just dark and messed up people doing dark and messed up things in 1938 yes i never thought i was gonna find my people in a book from the 30s and which sounds so silly right but it's nice to know that if i was alive then there would have been a book for me back in the day too so that's gonna do it for my five star predictions this was so much fun you guys and i have to say i was saying this to sarah and lindsay the other day like i was so resistant in so many ways because i don't make a tbr i don't like to plan i don't like to be on a schedule i don't like to be on a timeline for things with the exception of uva which again i understand why people love the book it just is not my book like it's not a book that i would ever read again or go back to i was pleasantly surprised so happy that i did this so grateful that i pushed myself to read a lot of these books and to not read just straight up thrillers across the board so all that to say this was amazing fun and one more time if you have not checked out sarah and lindsay's videos definitely do that and if you were here because of them and that's how you found me thanks for coming by and spending some of your time with me and thanks to everyone for being here let me know if you've read any of these books thoughts feelings all the things down below and i will see you guys in the next video bye everybody [Music] you

Channel: Chapter and Converse

Views: 3,308

Keywords: booktube, book review, #fivestarpredictions, #booklistthursday, TBR, what's the scariest Stephen King book, the invisible life of Addie larue, fredrik backman, a man called ove review, sundown motel review, simone st. james, best books to read, rebecca, Daphne du Maurier, must read books, Manderley, ve schwab, books everyone read but me, book fomo, where to start with horror books, books about grief, what should I read next, Sarah's nightstand, Lindsay's little library

Id: EyXu9wNPPSE

Length: 28min 8sec (1688 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021