Calendar Girls April: Favorite Book with a Surprise Ending or Twist

Happy April! I promise I don’t have any April Fools jokes planned for y’all, just some straight-up honest gushing about books.

You guys! Surprise endings or shocking plot twists is one of my absolute favorite things in a book. A big twist gives the book such a wonderful feeling of fun and excitement! A book without any big surprises often falls flat for me. I want a book that can keep me on my toes!

So, obviously, I had a really hard time with this theme because I couldn’t pick just one favorite! Here are some of the amazing contenders that I was thinking of:

• Life of Pi by Yann Martel (OMG THAT ENDING!!!!)
• Angels and Demons by Dan Brown (okay, I was 15, it was shocking at the time…)
• The Scarlet Pimpernel by Emmuska Orczy (never saw his identity coming)
  Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi (seriously, what even HAPPENED?!?!?!)
• The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid (if you tell me you saw the love interest coming, then I’m calling you a liar)
• An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green (maybe I would have been less surprise if I’d have known it was a series…)

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

In the end I went with a book that a) I’m sure I’ve never used for Calendar Girls before and b) I read before ANY of these books. And, if we’re being honest, it might be the book that MOST shocked the socks off me. Ever. So, without any further ado, my favorite book with a surprise ending is…

Six Degrees of Separation: The French Lieutenant’s Woman to Angels and Demons

Six Degrees of Separation is a monthly blog event hosted by Kate at booksaremyfavoriteandbest. It’s inspired by the 6 Degrees of Separation, a movie game where you attempt to connect actors in six movies or less. But we do it with books!

This month we’re starting with The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles.

---

Well, I’ve never read The French Lieutenant’s Woman. 20th century literature, ick. However, I read the synopsis on goodreads! It appears to feature a looooove triangle. Another classic novel featuring a love triangle is…

Throwback Thursday: The DaVinci Code

You know how sometimes a book gets SO big that it gets read by literally everyone, even people who don’t like to read? When I was in high school that happened to The DaVinci Code. 

It was a book that inspired passionate opinions. One person told me if I read it I would go to hell. Another person told me that they were reading it because “you have to know what the other side thinks.” One of my best friends like it enough that she then proceeded to read every Dan Brown book ever written, and enjoyed Digital Fortress so much that she took the phrase “without wax” as her personal motto, and signed all our yearbooks that way. Still another friend told me it was absolute crap and she didn’t know what the big deal was.

Eventually the fervor died down, and now every Half Price Books in the world has more copies stacked on their shelves than they know what to do with, like Twilight or Harry Potter. But my husband and I both enjoyed it well enough that we still own a copy. Side note, before he met me my husband read like, five books, and the fact that one of them was The DaVinci Code really says something about either the book or the fad, don’t know which.