Galaxy “Alex” Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. By age twenty, in fact, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she’s thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of the world’s most elite universities on a full ride. What’s the catch, and why her?

Still searching for answers to this herself, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. These eight windowless “tombs” are well-known to be haunts of the future rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street and Hollywood’s biggest players. But their occult activities are revealed to be more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive.

Okay first I like to point out again that this is very much an adult book. It touches on sexual abuse including a child, drugs and many other things. It also is pretty gory, cruel and detailed in some areas. So, while this is an fantastic book in my opinion, if those themes bother you, you might want to skip this one. This book took me a bit to get into, as I was not familiar with Yale or the secret societies within. All I know of Yale is what I saw on Gilmore Girls lol, so the setting took me a bit but after page 50 or somewhere around there it was much easier to follow. I loved Alex, she was such a flawed character and sometimes even borderline on villain, but she stood her own. She struggled, but she was true and grew. Her self-doubt was also raw but she never gave up on things. I loved how she grew throughput the book, not just herself but the friendships she made along the way. A lot of this book introduced her to us and showed us her backstory and it really was heartbreaking most of the time. I loved the Magic in this word, I also liked that we learned a lot of it though Alex as she learned it. The ghosts or Greys as they called here was something I liked as well. Pretty early in on the book it's clear that Alex can more than just see them. I was not sure how some of the things connected but at the end it came all together and made sense. I love the friendships she makes along the way and some people I really enjoyed more, or the way they were with Alex. Like Dawes, Mercy and even Turner, I like to see where things go from there. Darlington, I wasn’t sure but I really ended up liking him and I’m curious to see where that all goes. Overall, I really loved this book, even though it has some pretty cruel moments. But overall it was creepily scary and hauntingly  enjoyable and I’m looking forward to book two already.

I rate it 4.5 ★

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Flatiron Books is a new name in the publishing world and everything is a first for them including the first five books for their "upcoming Winter 2015 list."

four of these piqued my curiosity:

the fifth one was not up my alley. i have never been that interested in the fashion industry but i do love reading fictional accounts about it and not about the real stuff. the one i'm skipping is

i have four out of five to look forward to especially the one about the late Supreme Head of the most dangerous place on earth - North Korea's Kim Jong-il.

*received a copy for review from NetGalley

I realize I am a little late to the table on this one, but bear with me if you have not read these books. I stopped asking for samplers in the recent past, because I tend to read an excerpt, like the book, and order it. Then, time passes and my early onset Alzheimers (thank you Lisa Genova for teaching me that term, by the way) kicks in, and I think to myself, Wait, did I already read this? Not good.

So… full disclosure, I am pretty sure I picked this sampler from NetGalley because I loved the cover. Seriously, and it was a sampler, not even the real book. But to be fair, that flatiron building is awesome, and I am a sucker for an inviting illustration. This would be a terrific example of when judging a book by its cover actually paid off, because this quirky collection of non-fiction really delivered, with stories about PTSD, couture fashion, the making of a clinical psychologist and a dictator, and finally, a man who bought 420 pounds of beef to give his family a better life. Honestly, each one was better than the one before. I am not sure if I will read all the books, but I would recommend at the very least that you get the sampler and check them out for yourself. I found them all appealing, and certainly very different from one another. All were well written, piqued my interest in a variety of topics, and were oddly compelling.

At the top of my list, surprisingly to me, was Jared Stone’s The Year of the Cow. But maybe that’s just because I’m a Cowie, who knows.

Here is the list of books included in the collection:

Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story, by Mac McClelland

The Battle of Versailles: The Night American Fashion Stumbled into the Spotlight and Made History, by Robin Givhan

A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator’s Rise to Power, by Paul Fischer

The Skeleton Cupboard: The Making of a Clinical Psychologist, by Tanya Byron

Year of the Cow: How 420 Pounds of Beef Built a Better Life for One American Family, by Jared Stone