what i'm reading...april edition

Oh, my gosh... How is it already the middle of April? My TBR is growing daily, but I'm chipping away, with many good books to look forward to. 

First up: The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clemantine Wamariya. This is the book I chose for the April selection from Book of the Month. The first chapter retells her experience on Oprah.

Summary from Penguin Random House: Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbors began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were thunder. In 1994, she and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, fled the Rwandan massacre and spent the next six years migrating through seven African countries, searching for safety—perpetually hungry, imprisoned and abused, enduring and escaping refugee camps, finding unexpected kindness, witnessing inhuman cruelty. They did not know whether their parents were dead or alive. 
 
When Clemantine was twelve, she and her sister were granted refugee status in the United States; there, in Chicago, their lives diverged. Though their bond remained unbreakable, Claire, who had for so long protected and provided for Clemantine, was a single mother struggling to make ends meet, while Clemantine was taken in by a family who raised her as their own. She seemed to live the American dream: attending private school, taking up cheerleading, and, ultimately, graduating from Yale. Yet the years of being treated as less than human, of going hungry and seeing death, could not be erased. She felt at the same time six years old and one hundred years old. 
 
In The Girl Who Smiled Beads, Clemantine provokes us to look beyond the label of “victim” and recognize the power of the imagination to transcend even the most profound injuries and aftershocks. Devastating yet beautiful, and bracingly original, it is a powerful testament to her commitment to constructing a life on her own terms.

The other books I am reading:

The Last Time I Lied by by Riley Sager
All the Beautiful Lies by Peters Swanson
Other Peoples Houses by Abbi Waxman
When Life Gives you Lululemons by Lauren Weisberger
​Our House by Louise Candlish