First Few Pages - Fully Booked Blog

First Few Pages: Fairest

Posted on August 4, 2020| Posted in First Few Pages

A singular, beautifully written coming-of-age memoir of a Filipino boy with albinism whose story travels from an immigrant childhood to Harvard to a gender transition and illuminates the illusions of race, disability, and gender. Read the first few pages of Meredith Talusan's memoir, Fairest, here at the Fully Booked blog.

First Few Pages: Mexican Gothic

Posted on July 30, 2020| Posted in First Few Pages

Silvia Moreno-Garcia's new novel is set in 1950s Mexico and follows protagonist Noemí Taboada to a distant house called High Place in the Mexican countryside. In a frantic letter, her newlywed cousin is begging for anyone to save her from a mysterious doom. Noemí is not sure what she will find. Read the first few pages here.

First Few Pages: The Damned

Posted on July 23, 2020| Posted in First Few Pages

Bastien is now cursed and forever changed. The price of loving Celine was costly, but Celine has also paid a high price for loving him. Just as they begin to uncover the danger around them, and war between the immortals seems imminent, they learn their love could tear them apart.

Read on to read the first few pages.

First Few Pages: Becoming Better Grownups

Posted on July 15, 2020| Posted in First Few Pages

When his first book tour ended, Brad Montague missed hearing other people’s stories so much that he launched what he dubbed a Listening Tour. First visiting elementary schools and later also nursing homes and retirement communities, he hoped to glean new wisdom as to how he might become a better grownup. Now, in this playful and buoyant book, he shares those insights with rest of us –timeless, often surprising lessons that bypass the head we’re always stuck in, and go straight to the heart we sometimes forget.

First Few Pages: A Burning

Posted on July 8, 2020| Posted in First Few Pages

Jivan is a Muslim girl from the slums, determined to move up in life, who is accused of executing a terrorist attack on a train because of a careless comment on Facebook. PT Sir is an opportunistic gym teacher who hitches his aspirations to a right-wing political party, and finds that his own ascent becomes linked to Jivan’s fall. Lovely–an irresistible outcast whose exuberant voice and dreams of glory fill the novel with warmth and hope and humor–has the alibi that can set Jivan free, but it will cost her everything she holds dear.

First Few Pages: The Son of Good Fortune

Posted on July 1, 2020| Posted in First Few Pages

Excel spends his days trying to seem like an unremarkable American teenager. When he’s not working at The Pie Who Loved Me (a spy-themed pizza shop) or passing the time with his girlfriend Sab (occasionally in one of their town’s seventeen cemeteries), he carefully avoids the spotlight.

But Excel knows that his family is far from normal. His mother, Maxima, was once a Filipina B-movie action star who now makes her living scamming men online. The old man they live with is not his grandfather, but Maxima’s lifelong martial arts trainer. And years ago, on Excel’s tenth birthday, Maxima revealed a secret that he must keep forever. “We are ‘TNT’—tago ng tago,” she told him, “hiding and hiding.” Excel is undocumented—and one accidental slip could uproot his entire life.

Casting aside the paranoia and secrecy of his childhood, Excel takes a leap, joining Sab on a journey south to a ramshackle desert town called Hello City. Populated by drifters, old hippies, and washed-up techies—and existing outside the normal constructs of American society—Hello City offers Excel a chance to forge his own path for the first time. But after so many years of trying to be invisible, who does he want to become? And is it possible to put down roots in a country that has always considered you an outsider?

First Few Pages: How Democracies Die

Posted on June 25, 2020| Posted in First Few Pages

Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die—and how ours can be saved.

First Few Pages: Party of Two

Posted on June 17, 2020| Posted in First Few Pages

Dating is the last thing on Olivia Monroe’s mind when she moves to LA to start her own law firm. But when she meets a gorgeous man at a hotel bar and they spend the entire night flirting, she discovers too late that he is none other than hotshot junior senator Max Powell. Olivia has zero interest in dating a politician, but when a cake arrives at her office with the cutest message, she can’t resist—it is chocolate cake, after all.

First Few Pages: The Mirror & the Light

Posted on June 10, 2020| Posted in First Few Pages

First Few Pages: Chain of Gold

Posted on May 14, 2020| Posted in First Few Pages