Welcome to Litsy!

#ShowSomeLove Day 7: Some kind of #RedCovers - bought at the online book sale of Big Bad Wolf here in the UAE. Much needed book-buying-therapy.

Here are my #JanuaryStats! 😄 Kept up a decent number of nonfiction reads, cranked through 6 audio books— need to step up my numbers for POC/foreign authors and this will be a great month to do just that.

The book that really took me by surprise (and for a ride) is tagged: a fantastic, horrifying adventure to/across Uganda. Highly recommend.

Best read: Fangirl 👍🏻
Least favorite: Dear Cyborgs 👎🏻

Some said it was God‘s will that she survived at all. So many were still gone. Their fates might never be known. Rose understood the impossibility of hope: how could you want your child alive, knowing the acts he must have committed in order to remain so? But how could you wish for anything else?

How could you support Museveni‘s army, when they committed atrocities of their own? When it could be your child, your lover, fleeing their bullets?

When you spend enough time living at the periphery of anarchy, your perspective begins to shift. Normal becomes whatever surrounded you. You recognize that all life is risk, danger is relative, and death arrives equally by the swiftest machete or the tiniest mosquito.

When the place itself is peril, there‘s no use building walls—the menace is in the air you breathe, in the sunlight and rain that fall across your face when you turn it to the sky.

“Ocen is a part of this too. We haven‘t forgotten him. It‘s just easier to spur people to action when it‘s an American life at stake.”

The injustice of this truth should have outraged her. Tens of thousands of abducted Acholi children, more slaughtered at the rebels‘ hands; how many dead & dying in IDP camps?

Ah, but should a “mono” girl be among them! Then we may intervene; then we may act. She felt nothing. She‘d heard this story before.

Absolutely stunning debut.

Written with the complexities of a Karin Slaughter mystery and the human agony of MR Carey‘s “hungry” books— we meet Sabine, a German former aid worker, looking for her missing American niece Lily in Uganda which is in the middle of a war. Rose, taken as a girl to the rebel camps, lost touch with her beau, Ocen (Lily‘s regular driver). The women are forced to work together in hope of finding their loved ones alive.

“When asked how it felt to be a mother, Hannah replied, “It feels as though a piece of my heart exists outside my own body, in another person. And I can never get it back.” This answer confirmed to Sabine that she would never have children— because why would you want a piece of your heart in such a precarious location? Why choose that uncertainty? Love made you choose some above others. And so, many years later, her heart was lonely—but intact.”

“Selfish as it was to admit, it was invigorating to be mixed up in the wrongs of the world, to have a finger on the pulse of evil.

Better the danger you can see and touch and beat back with sticks than the one that comes slinking through the shadows, entering your home through a hole in your heart.”

#forgotten #newyearreads

1. Uninhibited

2. Prolific

3. Heartbreaking

Not a bad wait at the airport when I've got coffee, Litsy, and this amazing book. #currentlyreading

Another Goodreads win!
Looks good!

starting a new read tonight! 🤗