About

About Me

My name is Jessica. I’m 27 years old and I live in Utah. I love to read Young Adult (especially fantasy-fiction and dystopian) and classic literature. I also like to write and what better to write about than my life? Because looking back makes me realize how funny my life was. Painful at the time, but hilariously funny now. I’m also a stay-a-home mom with two young boys. My house is not as clean as it could be, but I don’t really care. Books are an escape for a reason.

Besides reading, I love to play the piano, the guitar, and video games. I’m a tech nerd and I love to keep up on the latest in cool gadgets. I don’t always buy the latest and greatest gadgets, but I do know everything about them (Case in point – I do not own a smart phone or even an iPad but I could tell you everything you wanted to know about them). I love cooking because I love eating. I can make some mean Italian and the best Chinese take-out you’ve ever had.

I also love to travel. I’ve been married to my best friend and fellow traveler who loves adventure as much as I do for 7 years. I try to go somewhere new at least once a year. Some of my favorite places that I’ve been: Paris, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Bruges, Bath, Moab, California, Boston, Vermont, San Antonio, The Grand Canyon and lots of other places in between.

My Favorite Books

Contact Me

booksatruestory@gmail.com

If you want to contact me about reviewing your book, please read my review policy.

Social Media

Here are the social media sites that I’m a part of.

About the Blog

I write book reviews for mostly Young Adult books and a few classics here and there. I love to participate in memes like Mailbox Monday/Stacking the Shelves, Waiting on Wednesday and Top Ten Tuesday. Events are a big thing I do on my blog (I even have a whole page for it). I love online book events as well as meeting authors at book signings. I will often write up detailed posts about author events I go to. I have two features that I love to do.

Google Diaries – When I read a book, I ask a LOT of questions and sometimes I will search a ton of stuff on Google. If I found some cool stuff, I write a post about it. I look up things like books mentioned, art, pop cultural references, places, locations, or even actor photos if the characters remind me of someone. Check out my Google Diaries.
Shelving by Covers – I love seeing what new books are coming out, but I wanted to make it a little more fun. I “judge” the book by it’s cover and place them in categories like “Hair Zac Efron Would Be Jealous Of” etc. Check out my Shelving by Cover posts.

Blog Mission Statement

Why I blog: I blog for fun! I thought that after a year of blogging, I would run out of things to say about books and that hasn’t been true! This blog will always be a personal place for me to share my love of books and interact with the other bloggers and readers in this great community. I have turned too many of my hobbies that I love into “jobs”and I don’t want to do that to this blog. For that reason, I’m not going to actively pursue relationships with publishers for the time being because it takes a lot of hard work and comes with a lot of pressure. In short, it would suck the fun out of blogging for me. So I will continue to pay for almost all of my giveaways and other expenses of blogging out of my own pocket. Maybe someday my Amazon links will help out with these expenses.

This blog’s purpose: I write the kind of reviews that I would want to read. I like short reviews, content warnings, and clean formatting that is easy to read. I am very paranoid about spoilers so I almost never read a book’s synopsis and that’s why I don’t post them on my reviews. The main purpose of my reviews is to share what I thought about the book and it’s content to help you find great books to read.

My values: I will always be as honest and polite as I can in all the posts I write here. If I had to pick between the two, honesty will always win. I pledge to not plagiarize and steal other’s work. I try to only promote books that I’ve personally read and enjoyed through giveaways, blog tours, author interviews etc.

My Writing

The other goal of my blog was to put some of my writing here. Most of my writing will be about my life. That’s why I picked the title “Books: A True Story.” It highlights my book reviews and my writing all in one title. Plus, it leaves me room to write about other random things that I feel like.

I have tried blogging before and I didn’t like it. I’m also not a fan of personal blogs mostly because I’m a private person but also because I like to be honest in my journal and I’d like to keep my honesty to myself, at least concerning my current life events. My sister, Andrea, loves blogging and she tried to convince me to write one. I told her the only things that interest me are books…and I’ve been wanting to write these stories from my past. That’s it! I’ll write a book blog! I’m loving it so far.

See an archive of all my writing.

Flashback Fridays

First of all, I’d like to thank my sister, Andrea, for the awesome name. I’ve always wanted to write down my memories as I remembered them. Looking back on my life makes me realize how funny it was. Painful at the time, but hilariously funny now. As an adult looking back, I realize now that some of the things I remember are not factual. So when I call these “true stories,” I mean it in the sense that they are true to the way I saw, felt and experienced them at the time and children don’t always get the facts straight. I think imposing my adult paradigm on my childhood takes the truth out of them. So what I tell you is true…from a certain point of view. And a wise man once said, “You’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.”

Some of you may notice that a lot of my Flashback Friday posts have a lot to do with digestive distress. The reason for this is I was recently diagnosed with IBS and I felt this light bulb go off in my head – oh, that’s why all those things happened to me! Suddenly, all of these memories that I thought were random started connecting with an undiagnosed problem that I had my whole life. These memories kept bouncing around in my head and wouldn’t give me any rest until I wrote them down. I actually wrote the Civil War in 3^rd Period English piece months before I ever started this blog. Many of these stories I kept secret because I was ashamed of them, but I realize that they are part of who I am and finding the humor in my trials and then telling them publicly is so liberating to me. It frees me from the shame that I’ve felt for a long time.

Updated March 23, 2013