For just a hair over 200 pages, this debut novel by French-Canadian author Eve Lemieux (translated from the original French text to English by fellow For just a hair over 200 pages, this debut novel by French-Canadian author Eve Lemieux (translated from the original French text to English by fellow French-Canadian Cayman Rock), this book packs in a whole lot of story, filled to the brim with emotions and a roller coaster’s worth of events in the life of Philomena, a totally disorganized and completely codependent young woman living in Montreal who doesn’t know who she is unless she’s attached to someone else. She has no sense of self unless it’s in relation to someone else. In this sense, she’s completely a social creature: humans were never meant to be alone. And Philomena? She just ceases to exist when alone.
The narrative style is going to turn some people off, owing to both its stream of consciousness prose and non-linear timeline. It’s also a very heavy book: not in density, but emotionally and psychologically. For those who usually need trigger warnings or content warnings before reading a book, a warning from me: literary fiction doesn’t give you those. All I will tell you is that if you’re a reader who usually needs those before you can proceed in reading a book, then please proceed with caution.
The best passages of writing in this book are when Lemeiux really gets down to the business of pointing out–without blatantly pointing out–how much we humans are just like animals. Just base mammals designed to eat, sleep, drink, eliminate certain things out of our bodies in a timely fashion or when things are toxic for us, fornicate, fight, procreate, and die. We all do it. Every day we are just animals covered in fabric moving around like we know what we’re doing, when most of the time we’re really just like Philomena: afraid and unable to be alone, needing to be around people, needing to be around our people, and most of the time not knowing what we’re doing with our lives. Sometimes we’re just waiting around to die. Sometimes that decision is just taken out of our hands by our bodies or by outside interference.
There are a great many metaphors and similes involving animals other than humans in this book, just to drive the message home, but those passages didn’t impress me near as much as Lemieux’s excellent and sometimes disturbing pointed messages about how we need to remember we’re still animals and we still act like them, too.
I did cry at the end. I didn’t think I would, but in that last 10% of the book it got all very heavy for me, and by the time the last page had been turned, I had tears coursing down my cheeks. Philomena would eventually find her way. It wasn’t a happily-ever-after, but animals don’t know the meaning of those words anyway. ...more
I’ve always had a really good relationship with the older people in my life. When I was a child, I got along better with my grandma and great aunts beI’ve always had a really good relationship with the older people in my life. When I was a child, I got along better with my grandma and great aunts better than I got along with my cousins. I used to go to the local convalescent hospital and visit with elderly patients who had no one to visit them. When I was a teenager I’d rather spend the day with my grandma than my mom, because I was way more like my grandma than I was my mom. So you would think I wouldn’t mind the idea of aging. After all, I’d been around it all my life. You’d be wrong. I don’t fear death one bit. But aging? Aging is something that scares the beejesus out of me. The slow, inexorable loss of everything you were and everything you had until there is nothing left but the days waiting for the end. No thanks. Do not want.
Yet aging isn’t what’s so scary and insidious when it comes to “We Spread”. It’s memory and time; or, rather, the lack of both and the way it can be messed with and we would never know it once our minds start to close certain pathways down in order to conserve power so we can live just that much longer. I may not even be 50 yet, but some of this is deeply familiar to me, since I have a form of epilepsy where I lose chunks of time. At its worst, I lost months at a time. My greatest fear was (and still is) that someone in my life will gaslight me and start telling me I did things and just start telling me, “Oh, you just don’t remember.” Can you imagine? Not having enough control over your memories that someone could tell you something and because of your memory you believe them because you trust them? (Yes, I have major trust issues.)
This book is, in a way, deeply touching in the way it practically begs us to look at the elderly not as a group, but as individual people who still have something to give to the world. Not people who should just be put into a home and forgotten, but people who still have stories to tell, wisdom to spread, beauty to show, affection to give, and memories to share (even when they’re fragmented). The elderly aren’t to be dismissed or underestimated. They are still people with hearts and minds. It’s a lesson most of the western world has forgotten.
The way in which Reid chooses to put a big, red pin on this issue is by setting this book inside a private long-term residence care home, where there are only four elderly residents: two females, two males, and all four have very distinctive areas of specialty. A musician. A mathematician. A linguist. An artist. A holistic education for any young mind. But these minds aren’t young. Their caregiver is obsessed with keeping them productive, making sure they eat, making sure they’re clean, making sure they sleep. Normally, these would all be the hallmarks of the very best kind of caregiver, if it didn’t come with hefty doses of gaslighting (but is it?), undercurrents of malice (or are we imagining it?), casual dismissals of patient concerns, the mistreatment of other patients (or have we just forgotten what happened to them?).
The prose is beautiful even when sad or reflective. It’s downright striking when the scenes are awkward, malevolent, or downright frightening.
What was the most surprising thing about this book for me is how fast it moves. I was reading a 250 page book yesterday and it took me all day. I read this book in less than five hours. That’s how engrossing, compelling, and simply fantastic this book is. It’s absolutely a psychological thriller at its finest.
Thanks to NetGalley, Gallery Books, and Scout Press for granting me access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review. ...more
Last winter I reviewed Kapelke-Dale’s second novel, “The Ballerinas”, and found it to be very average. I particularly didn’t like her usage of flashba Last winter I reviewed Kapelke-Dale’s second novel, “The Ballerinas”, and found it to be very average. I particularly didn’t like her usage of flashbacks in that book. “The Ingenue” is clever enough to not make the same mistakes that “The Ballerinas” made. It’s a much-improved book, though it’s not quite as brilliant as I’d hoped it would be, either.
The blurb advertises this book as “My Dark Vanessa” meets “The Queen’s Gambit”. I can totally see the influence of the former, but I don’t see any of the influence of the latter. I have a bone to pick about blurbs that mislead consumers. It reads to me as false advertising.
The structure of this book is one chapter of the present (the book is set in 2020), one very short interlude that is an excerpt from Saskia’s (our protagonist) mother’s feminist fairy tale retellings, and then one chapter that’s set in a year from Saskia’s childhood and teenage years leading up to when she’s 18 years old. The chapters set in the present serve as the setting for the central plot, the chapters set in Saskia’s past serve to give us insight into who Saskia was when she was a child, what she went through during her teenage years, and how she grew to be the person she is in the present. Essentially, how she grew from being a piano prodigy and society ingenue to a woman who no longer plays the piano and doesn’t know how to interact normally without people at all. And the feminist fairy tale retellings, written by Saskia’s mother, serve not only to show the juxtaposition between who Saskia and her mother were but also to underscore Saskia’s need to lead the charge and to be the one to save her home and slay her own dragons.
There is also an interesting and possibly overlooked theme running like a light melody on top of the main themes in this book: the privilege of the rich, white, and old money people. Saskia’s home, which she has always thought would be there if she needed to come back to it, is more of a castle than just a house. The amount of money for upkeep, cleaning, property taxes, and more is staggering, and these are all numbers adult Saskia (even at over 30 years old) never bothered to take into account and never thought about. The home has been in their family, passed down through her matrilineal line, since it was first built with money from a very successful beer brewery. It’s old money, for Milwaukee. Saskia had private piano tutors, which she outgrew quickly due to her brilliance on piano. She went to an expensive private school, which she took for granted. She wrecked an expensive car. She didn’t want to go to college because she figured she could just stay at home and record piano albums forever without trying to further her skills or networking in the industry. She simply felt as if money and a career should just fall into her hands. It wasn’t until she was 18 and she realized her life was stagnant that she decided to do something about it, and even that was a token effort. She just wasn’t prepared for a life without everything being handed to her.
Nonetheless, when it counts, this book takes that feeling of privilege and ownership of that beloved castle and the past that still haunts Saskia and channels it into the indignant rage of a woman raised by a feminist mom that says, “How dare you think you have a right to what is mine after what you did to me? What could you have said or done to my mother to make her agree to give away the one thing that’s our family legacy and would’ve helped my father set himself up for his retirement? Something is fishy here, and it’s not the lake we live on.”
It’s not a perfect book. I’ve said that before. It is very slow to start. It has a fabulous prologue to give us a taste of what’s to come, but then it took me a very long time to become engaged with the novel. I felt there was some unnecessary subplot action going on that could’ve been cut, but it could’ve been worse. But it’s certainly an interesting book, even if it’s a bit of a dark one.
Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for granting me access to this title.
File Under: Coming of Age/Suspense Thriller/Amateur Sleuth/Literary Fiction ...more
There are a handful of titles I’ve looked forward to with the grabbiest of hands, and “Hester” is one of them. I’m excited, if not absolutely gleeful,There are a handful of titles I’ve looked forward to with the grabbiest of hands, and “Hester” is one of them. I’m excited, if not absolutely gleeful, to report that it absolutely exceeded expectations. This novel is absolutely a beautiful tragedy, stunning in its sadness and gorgeous in its grief. It’s also a story about the ugly parts of mankind, about how much strength it takes to keep getting back up again when the world keeps knocking you down, and a testimony to what it is to swim against the current when you are at your most vulnerable.
I found myself re-reading passages in this book simply for the loveliness of them, or because I was so lost in the lyrical beauty of them I lost how the thread of them attached to the plot of the book. The book is steeped long and deep in symbolism and metaphor, but not to the point where it becomes cliche or too on the nose. It’s got that same knack of symbolism and metaphor that Erin Morgenstern has, where the symbols and metaphors are so woven into the book that “Hester” wouldn’t be the book it is without them. It would come undone, unraveling at the seams. The symbols are as big a part of the book as the characters themselves. In a way, the symbolism is a character in and of itself. And I’m here for it. This book isn’t in the magical realism genre, but it’s only a short hop away from it. If anything, I’d say it’s slightly mystical in a way.
The cast of characters is the right size for the novel and each is carefully crafted with unique personalities shaped with the primary idea in this novel of how there is darkness and light in every heart. The only purity of heart we see is in children, which is only right, since fear and hatred are learned behavior. Not even our protagonist, Isobel, is pure and righteous. Nor should she be: the message at the heart of this book is we all do what we must (and some just do nothing). Isobel indeed does what she must, and in her journey she becomes harder, stronger, shrewder, and more in the effort to survive the tough life she is living in Salem.
The plot is impeccably crafted, leaving no wasted pages or pacing in the entire book. It’s the perfect length for a beautifully crafted piece of literature. It made for a cozy read on an October day, and I would gladly read it again.
Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for granting me early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review. ...more
Reading this short but satisfying book is a surreal experience for someone like me, who is a huge fan of the author John Cheever (especially if, like Reading this short but satisfying book is a surreal experience for someone like me, who is a huge fan of the author John Cheever (especially if, like me, you’ve devoured and dissected his short story “The Swimmer” more times than you can count). I don’t know enough about author Marcy Dermansky to know all of her literary heroes and influences, but this book has that same morbid humor, surreal atmosphere, and satirical prose I love so much about Cheever’s work, not to mention this book and Cheever’s “The Swimmer” both involve main characters who spend their entire stories traveling from pools to pools in search of their final destinations.
Despite the similarity to Cheever in those ways, there are a great many differences to his work, too. I would certainly hope so, since Dermansky is definitely not the neurotic, egocentric, alcoholic, and depressed John Cheever who struggled with personal demons his entire life. “Hurricane Girl” has a story to tell about agency: about it being taken away from you by the people you thought you could trust, about it being taken away by people who think they have the right to it, and about it being taken away from you from the people who are supposed to love you. It’s also about how sometimes we willingly give up our agency: out of desperation to find people to trust, out of hoping to find love, out of hoping to find some good in this world, and out of hoping the people who are supposed to love you won’t disappoint you.
But this is dark, morbid humor. This is dark satire. When you’ve lost everything you possessed in the entire world you quickly learn the only person you can trust is yourself, no matter how screwed up you are. You and your health are all you have. You can’t trust anything else. You can only trust those two things for sure and then hang onto the core things you value above everything else, no matter if it’s something as trivial as swimming pools or a trusty water bottle.
It’s a quick, engaging, surreal, meandering trip through a concussed woman’s Wonderland. From South Carolina to New Jersey to Florida and then back again, we’re just the passenger as she blows her way through the Eastern seaboard, leaving confusion in her wake.
Thanks to Knopf Publishing for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review! ...more
I had a bit of a hard time reading this book, but it’s not because it’s not a good book. It’s actually quite good. It’s just that I get restless easilI had a bit of a hard time reading this book, but it’s not because it’s not a good book. It’s actually quite good. It’s just that I get restless easily, and this is the kind of book that’s more about the characters and their emotions than events. Actually, change that: this book is more about how a single event affects the characters, their emotions, and their relationships over the course of what seems like a lifetime to the main character and narrator, but what, in reality, is just a little over a year. Books like this take quite a bit longer for me to read than other books because they seem to sit quite still in a way, lingering in its own thoughts in a way I never do, and then I get distracted for a while before I remember to come back to the book.
So it’s not a fast read. Not at all. But it’s a worthy and good read.
I’d like to say I’ve got a good grasp on what to write for this review, but I don’t. Since it’s literary fiction and I don’t really identify with the main character in any way it’s not like I can tap into that. I guess here’s what I think I can say:
Sometimes things happen when we’re young and in our formative years that affect us and our decisions for the rest of our lives. It can skew our decisions, perspective, emotions, and relationships in innumerable ways for the rest of our lives. And Karen Winn does an amazing job in not only writing with sincerity and compassion how those ripple in the pond play out, but she doesn’t leave anyone out, either. I think her decision to set this story in a sleepy little town and to concentrate the story even further on one small suburban neighborhood was very wise, because it allowed her to concentrate all her energy and talent on ensuring that same sincerity and compassion was extended to every character involved in the story. Some authors might have felt compelled to add more to the story to make it a little funnier or a little more dramatic or to add more romance, but Winn made a decision to stick with what she had and it paid off. To add anything more to this story would have taken away from it.
My only sincere complaint was the epilogue. I didn’t think it was needed, at all. I would’ve rather the book been left alone, as it was, sans epilogue. If you go to read this book, maybe try reading the book and stopping at the end and then waiting a while before you read the epilogue. Sit with the story for a while before you go read the epilogue. Savor the story for what it is before reading it. I recommend it.
Thanks to NetGalley and Dutton for early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review. ...more
This book had no right to be this good! I really didn’t know for sure what I was getting into with this book: I just knew it was about a prep school, This book had no right to be this good! I really didn’t know for sure what I was getting into with this book: I just knew it was about a prep school, involved queer themes, and involved something that sounded like dark academia. (Shush, I happen to love dark academia).
I started reading this stunning and tragic coming-of-age drama and got immediately sucked into it. The story of soft, impressionable Laura and her obsession with a long-dead author and his book both made me sad and fearful from the start. Moving high schools just so you can go to the alma mater of your literary hero? Moving away from your family just so you can live, breathe, eat, sleep, and learn in the same hallowed halls? That’s not a healthy thing for a teenager to do, but somehow Laura managed to convince her parents to let her attend. So she sets out to walk in his footsteps, looking for somewhere to belong, looking for something beautiful and transcendent, and she ends up becoming enmeshed with the school’s choir both due to her attraction to Virginia, their intense and charismatic leader, and because all of the choir’s members are just as obsessed with the same author as she is.
This book isn’t subtle about what it’s trying to be. It’d be kind of hard to pretend like you’re not somewhat reminiscent of “The Secret History” when you’re a mysterious, dark, and philosophical novel with queer themes set in a isolated prep school on the East Coast. But Burton was definitely more overt with the queer themes and upped the ante with a hefty dose of young white men who feel entitled to the women around them.
There is a lot of interesting discourse about the Madonna/Wh (putting the rest of the words there will get me in trouble) Complex, with two women in the story going through that dichotomy. Neither one of them can fully escape being both worshiped by men only to turn around and have those same men blaspheme them. There’s also a healthy dose of both questioning one’s sexuality and some internalized homophobia. All of it makes for an aching angst-fest that could remind some people of what it was like when they didn’t know who they fully were or what they fully wanted out of life.
In the end, all I can really say solidly is that I really enjoyed it. Like, would buy it and read it again.
Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review. ...more
This book is so much more than what it says on the box (or, in the blurb, if you will). This is no run-of-the-mill historical fiction or women’s detecThis book is so much more than what it says on the box (or, in the blurb, if you will). This is no run-of-the-mill historical fiction or women’s detective mystery. This book is part lyrical prose, part ghost story, part historical fiction, part detective story, part suspense, part thriller, and a whole lot of brilliant commentary on how missing girls are treated in America.
Our narrator is a sad sack. I’m sorry, but she really is. But that’s why I like her. She is, in a way, a miserable human being. Is it her fault she’s miserable? Both yes and no. Her misery, circumstances, and the story of how she ended up where she is in the beginning of this book show her both her culpability as an unreliable narrator and give us good reason not to like her. She’s a hustler, first and foremost. Coming in second is her curse of clairvoyance, which calls into question every memory or vision she sees.
Let’s take a step away from this narrator, who was once a missing girl herself but seems to have lived several different lives since then. Are they all her? Is she all them? In the end, shouldn’t every missing girl be equal to every other missing girl? That’s the question this book is asking. Is every missing girl the same as every other missing girl, or do some missing girls count for more? And there’s a question asked more than once in the novel hitting at the heart of this question: When does a girl stop being a girl? When do people just give up on missing girls, and when does a missing girl stop being just a missing girl and becomes more of a distant memory?
This book starts off strong and doesn’t let up. The stories within, both from the POV of our narrator and from the web of related and connected, are filled with suspense, ghosts both literal and figurative, a thin veil of terror, and heaps of longing and regret. For these characters there is really no future, but there is so much in each of their pasts that lead them to their end.
It’s a tragic and haunting story filled with almost a southern gothic feel at times, while still feeling like a beautiful piece of literary fiction.
Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review. ...more
This is a brilliant, clever book. I was automatically sucked in when I first read the blurb and couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. And once I had itThis is a brilliant, clever book. I was automatically sucked in when I first read the blurb and couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. And once I had it in my hands and I dove into the story, the book absolutely didn’t let me down.
Josh Weiss is a smart, bright author whom I hope will write many more books with as much sociopolitical savvy, sense of irony, and as deft at blending reality with terrifying alternative notions of “what could have been” in the future. Heck, I’d settle simply for Weiss’ ability to write sentences that in any other situation might read as mundane, but in the context of this novel they sound downright chilling.
I see a lot of reviews for this book rated lower than mine is, and I wonder if that might not be the age and/or gender demographic that’s been reading and reviewing it, because I simply don’t see the things other readers seem to be seeing.
There are just so many clever little easter eggs (our protagonist’s kind-of girlfriend’s name is Elizabeth Short, which (in this reality) is the real name of the murder victim most famously known as The Black Dahlia) and head trips that show just how much would have changed and how many people who gained infamy in this reality would be shoved down into ignomy if Joseph McCarthy had won if he had run for President (oh, and had Nixon for a VP, if you can shudder at that thought). Edward R. Murrow defamed and meets an untimely end before the book even begins. Walter Cronkite never being the legend of a news anchor that he became. John Huston being blackballed from Hollywood and wasting away in a moderately-sized house in Los Angeles.
Weiss also does an outstanding job of making it clear how many parallels there are between the reality inside this book to the actual reality we live in every day: homophobia, police violence, racism, linguistic fascism, housing segregation, and socioeconomic disparity. Public libraries have been replaced by offices for the House Un-American Activities Committee in almost every city, complete with their own agents (called Hueys) that operate outside of the purview of the DOJ. Any television, radio, or news you might get is regulated by the government (unless you manage to come across guerilla communications).
If you want to read a book in which the bad guys won before the book even started and it’s up to the plethora of characters in a book to try and right the wrong, then try this book. If you want a chilling look at what America could’ve looked like if McCarthyism had gained more ground than it did, then read this book. Heck–read this book just because it’s good!
Thanks to NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review, and to Grand Central Publishing for also supplying me with a finished copy of the book with no expectation of services rendered in exchange. ...more
My silk pillowcase currently hates me, because I have soaked it in tears. My mom was very concerned as I came out of my room wiping fat tears off my cMy silk pillowcase currently hates me, because I have soaked it in tears. My mom was very concerned as I came out of my room wiping fat tears off my cheeks and out of my red-rimmed eyes. She asked me if I was crying because the book was too sad. I told her no, I was crying because it had just made me feel so much I couldn’t help it. Then we both basically said the same thing: “Art is supposed to make you feel things. If it doesn’t make you feel something, it’s not good art.”
This book made me feel all the feels. My pillowcase tells the tale. So do my (now) swollen eyes. For about the last 15% of this book, practically all I did was sob as this book broke my heart and then put it back together piece by piece like an exquisite jigsaw puzzle. By the time the last words had come, I was practically shaking, overcome with a kind of relief I’ve never felt for two book characters ever before in my entire life.
Part of me had thought this book was surely overhyped. There was no way it could be as good as everyone was saying, could it? It was better than I had hoped. To me, this is Generation X in a book. This is me (born in 1978) picking up an original Nintendo game controller on Christmas morning in 1986 and playing Super Mario Brothers for the very first time and knowing life would never be the same. This is parents urging you to pursue what will make you money when you want to pursue what makes your heart race. This is putting up with casual racism and misogyny all the time because no one had ever said you didn’t have to put up with it. This was making the transition from landlines to cell phones and then never actually answering your cell phone but just texting. This was the transition from PC to console and then back to PC and then multi-porting.
This book wasn’t a book about video games. This book was about a generation raised playing them. This was a book about people who were raised knowing that video games meant infinite lives to restart but not infinite health. This was a book about a pair of people who knew real life contained infinite restarts but only one heart that could be broken so easily. In video games, they could live life after life and be whoever they wanted to be, but in the real world they were stuck being who they were, and sometimes being who they were was downright unbearable. But they could go to sleep, wake up tomorrow, and hit the restart button. But games get old just like people get old, and games get boring just like people get bored. And both the world and people can seem so bleak.
I insist you read this. It’s up there as one of the best 5 books I’ve read this year (according to GR I’ve read 361 books already this year), and I can tell it’s going to be stuck in my head, floating around there, making me think the philosophical and emotional thoughts for some time after this. You won’t be disappointed.
Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for granting me access to this book in exchange for a fair and honest review. ...more
This book is marketed as a thriller, suspense, and literary novel about a female vampire trying to find a way to balance her longing to live amongst hThis book is marketed as a thriller, suspense, and literary novel about a female vampire trying to find a way to balance her longing to live amongst humans full-time with her vampiric nature and need to feed. I have to say: that’s not what I got from it at all, but that’s absolutely not a bad thing. I honestly think had this been what was advertised it would’ve been a let down.
There was really no sense of suspense. There was no thrill. There was no mystery or tension. This is a lonely, pensive, somber study of a female vampire who suddenly finds herself fully thrust into the human world, alone, on a full-time basis after her vampire mother starts to (for lack of a better term) lose her mind in an almost Alzheimers-like way and she puts her in a nursing home. She’s been with her mother, and her mother alone, for a long time, and knows nothing of how to live among humans or how to care for herself as a vampire. Like, for instance, how to interact with them like humans should or how to even go about feeding herself on a regular basis without resorting to taking blood from humans.
The whole tenor and plot lends itself to an almost wretched, weighed-down introspective novel in which we have a female vampire who ostensibly looks like a college-aged artist interning at a prestigious art gallery after she’s graduated art school; but with no more guide posts and no one left to guide her in how to BE (her own mother refuses to acknowledge her existence since she’s been moved to a home), she’s simply left adrift and caught between two worlds. She doesn’t know how to legitimately find means to feed herself. She doesn’t know how to talk to humans, ask for what she needs or wants. She doesn’t know anything about the world at large. She doesn’t know how to object or how to speak up for herself. She doesn’t know what’s socially acceptable and what’s not. She’s been brought up to believe she’s a demon and suspects her mother only turned her to have someone to keep her company, and therefore she feels as if she has no purpose in life. What is her existence for, now? She’s like a child in a lot of ways and definitely not like a child in many others.
The entire time we’re inside Lydia’s mind, where she’s consumed by the hunger she resents, is apathetic towards, doesn’t really understand, doesn’t really know how to properly sate, and is never ending. She knows she won’t die if she doesn’t eat, but she knows it will cause unending pain. The reason this book holds no suspense is because we know this woman, ignorant and uncomprehending of how to get by, will eventually feed. She will eventually eat. We all get desperate at some point. At some point, we’ll all eat what’s eventually put in front of us when presented with no other options. Lydia is no different. She’s just given up by the time she does it. It’s more melancholy than thrilling.
Thanks to NetGalley and HarperVia for early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review. ...more
Holy cow, wow. I just knew, when I first read the description of this book, it was going to be special. It sounded like the best kind of “Doctor Who” Holy cow, wow. I just knew, when I first read the description of this book, it was going to be special. It sounded like the best kind of “Doctor Who” episode, and it absolutely was that, but it was made even better by a heartbreaking love story, a story of found family, sociopolitical and socioeconomic commentary and barbed jabs, and slick espionage.
Let me put it to you this way: this book cost me sleep, and I love my sleep. I need my sleep. But I started this book almost right after dinner this past evening and then stayed up until almost 2:30 am reading it because I couldn’t put the thing down. I even looked at my phone for the time at about 11:00 pm and contemplated going to sleep before I just gave up and knew I wasn’t going to bed until I had finished the book.
Some books are just worth losing some sleep. This is one of those books. The ones worth a quiet evening staying up and turning pages.
The plot is clever, tight, and so dang interesting. It’s hard to make time travel digestible without plot holes a’ plenty, but the plot devices woven into the narrative account for it! That’s some clever writing and I’m not even ashamed to admit it. The main character, January, is probably one of my favorite FMCs I’ve read in a novel so far this year, and her AI sidekick, Ruby, is so freaking sassy it makes me want one. The writing is sharp, witty, and bright. The narrative is crisp and clear. The prose is beautiful. I even cried toward the end and I’m not one to tear up easily.
If you like time travel, queer love stories, time heist stories, and a whole lot of crazy, I can’t recommend this book enough.
Thanks to NetGalley and Ballantine Books for this ARC in exchange for a fair and honest review! ...more
I love morally bankrupt characters. I love morally grey characters. I love unreliable narrators. I love characters who are just empty inside, as empty I love morally bankrupt characters. I love morally grey characters. I love unreliable narrators. I love characters who are just empty inside, as empty as the color eggshell white. This book is absolutely filled to the brim with nothing but all of these things: morally bankrupt characters, morally grey characters, an unreliable narrator, characters as empty as the eggshell white on their walls and bedding, and their eyes as glassy as the windows in their mansions in the hills above Los Angeles.
This book is absolutely fabulous. I picked it up and was swallowed within the first couple of pages. Every time I had to put it down to attend to something else I was bitter and put out. I ate my lunch holding my Kindle in one hand and shoving food in my mouth with the other.
This book is told in two juxtaposed first-person POV’s: Lyla, the rich wife of a rich man who’s the son of an even-richer woman, and “Demi”, a homeless woman who has stolen the identity of the actual Demi who was meant to move in as a tenant in the guest house below Lyla and her husband. When Lyla is telling the story it reads like satire, almost like something Kathy Wang (who wrote Impostor Syndrome) would write. When “Demi” is telling the story it reads more like something gothic and suspenseful, like Meg Abbot (who wrote “The Turnout”) would write. This is reflected in how both women talk about their situations and each other in the narrative prose, and it’s a stunning writing style. It makes for a great tapestry.
The book has a texture to it, but a very claustrophobic feeling. All of the action mostly takes place either in Lyla’s home, the guest house, or on the grounds of the main house in its entirety. As such, you feel like these characters are all isolated in this ultra-rich location high in the hills above Los Angeles, where no one but the richest should be able to breathe the cleanest air available and build elaborate houses that might burn or fall down any minute.
As these characters play their games with each other, you will be revolted in some ways, angry in other ways, sad in some ways, and savage in some ways. This book isn’t a happy book. It’s a razor-sharp and suspenseful book that peeks over two different shoulders into the lives of people who have more money than sense, no moral compass, and are utterly bored with the game of life. ...more
This book started off really strongly. For the first 15% or so, I couldn’t put it down. Then, until about the 50% mark, I couldn’t stop finding excuseThis book started off really strongly. For the first 15% or so, I couldn’t put it down. Then, until about the 50% mark, I couldn’t stop finding excuses to put it down or I kept dozing off. I was bored. Then I was mildly disinterested until about the 75% mark when my interest was piqued again and it carried me through to a mildly satisfying ending.
What I’m saying is: this novel is really uneven, but the premise is great.
For a debut novel in the romance and women’s fiction genre, it isn’t bad. But it isn’t spectacular, either. It has a promising premise, fully-realized characters, and–if it hadn’t suffered from a really uneven middle section–really great overarching themes that wove through the story seamlessly.
Some might have less issues with this book than I did. I’m not known for being the most patient of readers. I like my books to have tighter editing and to maintain a natural pacing that keeps people reading in the manner intended. To me, this book need not suffer a soggy middle section like it did. It could have been better. ...more
I’ve always loved Chekhov’s play, “The Cherry Orchard”, because Chekhov not only had a lovely way with words, but because he could convey so much abouI’ve always loved Chekhov’s play, “The Cherry Orchard”, because Chekhov not only had a lovely way with words, but because he could convey so much about the mutability of humans in a concise and clever way. The play is a classic for a good reason, and so when I saw there was going to be a novel not only about three times as long as the play but also updating the setting to Soviet Russia, I simply couldn’t resist. I wanted to know mainly if the author could capture the same story and the same lovely manner of storytelling as Chekhov without resorting to cheap tricks or melodrama. Would it be literary fiction or literary farce? My verdict? Literary fiction. An outstanding take on the classic play with the same feeling of ennui and mutability I cherished so much from Chekhov.
I have to let you know I annotated my copy very heavily, simply because so much of this book is not only beautifully written, but some of the narrative reveals and points are genuinely insightful and often scratchy with dry wit. Humor comes at unexpected times from unexpected sources, and yet even the humor that’s present is either morbid or almost bellicose in tenor.
This book is almost straight forward literary fiction, with a hefty chunk of the book relying on coming-of-age during the early 1980s. So you understand when I tell you this is not a quick read. The book is character-driven, with a large amount of characters all well worth taking the time to try and understand. The introspective passages about life in Soviet Russia, the notion of what makes a place home even if that place is absolutely terrible, how men and women do and don’t interact in a culture heavy with patriarchy, why so many Russians were absolutely okay with the autocratic version of Communism that reigned behind the Iron Curtain, and what it takes to be a survivor in a country that only cares if you live or die if you get in their way are all absolutely brilliant and the sentence-structure is lovely.
I can’t recommend this book enough. In a sea of novels updating old stories, it stands out as one of the best I’ve read.
Thanks to NetGalley and Ballantine Books for early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review. ...more
I have a contentious relationship with books involving time travel. It’s a love-hate relationship, to say the very least. When they’re good, they’re vI have a contentious relationship with books involving time travel. It’s a love-hate relationship, to say the very least. When they’re good, they’re very, very good. But when they’re bad, they’re simply horrid. It takes very little to collapse a time travel story into utter drivel. When I read the blurb for this book, I was intrigued by the notion that the time travel in this book would be achieved not by our intrepid scientists and scholars traveling to the past, but by pulling the past into the future, like one would pluck the best fruit from the tree.
Only, in this case, the best fruit they’re plucking from time is Julius Caesar, moments prior to his assassination on the Ides of March.
I was somewhat worried this book would be an awful bore, but it really wasn’t. It was engaging, fun, interesting, and had a well-plotted and well-executed story arc. It hooks you from the beginning by laying a few fun seeds that end up providing exposition and helping plot points become fulfilled later in the book, which was a nifty and entertaining way of problem-solving just when you were wondering how the heck the characters were going to get out of a certain predicament.
I also worried this book would be bogged down with science jargon and academic brou-ha-ha (which you’d think I’d enjoy, being a scientist and academic myself), but the author thoughtfully didn’t try and attempt to bore her readers with too much science and instead focused on her characters, which was the right call, in my opinion. And the characters were so well-developed because of it.
And, let me just say: any book that has not only a high-speed car chase with Julius Caesar involved and then adds in an emergency escape flight by vintage plane with the same historical figure is totally worth reading.
Thanks to NetGalley and Imbrifex Books for early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review. ...more
There’s a question asked several times in this book that, essentially, forms the whole philosophical core of the text: What is a perfect map?
The answeThere’s a question asked several times in this book that, essentially, forms the whole philosophical core of the text: What is a perfect map?
The answer, obvious to anyone who’s ever taken a single cartography class (and pointed out by one of the book’s characters) is this: There is no such thing as a perfect map. There can’t be. Every map is imperfect or distorted in some way. Even maps made using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software can’t be perfect, because even those maps rely on digitized map projections that already exist. You can trust me on this: I have a degree in geography and have spent a good many hours making maps using GIS software. Many people aren’t even aware of how many map projections there are, or how varied they can be. What they distort, where they distort it, where it isn’t distorted. More than that, though, maps simply can’t be perfect! The Earth is an oblate spheroid, and it’s always shifting. No matter how hard you try, every map becomes obsolete in a matter of a year or so. There’s no way to stop it, because ther only thing that truly endures is change.
The plot of this book isn’t completely watertight, and the pacing is a little uneven. I had expected it to be a little more suspenseful and a little more taute, but that’s maybe because I knew of the concept of “phantom settlements” (AKA Paper Towns) from back when I was still in community college taking Geography 101. I even knew about the actual paper town that’s discussed in this book, believe it or not. So I was thrilled to see Sheperd take the very real concept of phantom settlements and create a hypothetical scenario in which, by some way of some fantastic magical realism worldbuilding, phantom settlements actually appear so long as a map of said settlement exists somewhere.
What I didn’t enjoy too much were the stories from the other character’s POV, because I felt it took some of the mystery and suspense away from the story. Once those characters started telling their story I quickly realized every plot twist and turn for the rest of the book. That ruined a lot of the joy that could’ve come from reading this book.
Shepherd’s prose is on point, of course, as are the overarching questions this book may cause you to ask. I love magical realism as a genre, so I enjoyed seeing my lifelong love of maps employed in such a plot.
Thanks to NetGalley and William Morrow for the early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review, and another thank you to William Morrow and publicist D. Bartlett for my complimentary physical copy of the book. You’re the best! ...more
This book is another of my most-anticipated reads of 2022. Given my slight obsession with books that focus on the senses as a plot device (olfactory bThis book is another of my most-anticipated reads of 2022. Given my slight obsession with books that focus on the senses as a plot device (olfactory being my favorite, which is the sense this book relies on), it’s hardly a surprise that I wrote directly to the publisher in order to get early access to this title. I wasn’t going to let it slip away from me. I was focused on getting my hands on it, and I am so happy I did, because it was so good.
This book wasn’t exactly everything I hoped for, but it was dang close. Close enough to warrant the full five stars. The first-person POV narration is written as if this were a memoir written by an unreliable narrator. In this way, the book reminds me of Nabokov’s “Lolita”: you know from page one of both that classic novel and this book that your narrator is not to be trusted. They’re spinning the yarn, and you’re only getting to see what they are choosing to show you. In this book, the narrator, going by the name Vic Fowler, even breaks the literary fourth wall to speak to us readers directly, because he needs to make sure he has our attention. He’s a vain man who longs for someone to understand him or to accept him.
The perfume industry is one historically steeped in barbarism, shady experiments, and chemical experimentations I cannot even begin to understand. But I’ve always had a strong nose, even for being a girl growing up in a smoking household, and I’ve always adored perfumes (I have worn the same scent for a good many years now: Marc Jacobs Daisy). I can remember vibrantly the smell of my grandmother wearing White Shoulders, my mother wearing Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door, my prom date (and eventual assaulter) wearing Aspen, too many boys I went to high school with wearing Drakkar Noir, my ex-girlfriend and how she always smelled neutrally of Ivory soap and cigarettes, the heady and dark smell of the wall of leather floggers at Mr. S in San Francisco, and my ex-husband smelling of Ralph Lauren Polo Blue and sweat. None of my memories can compare with the in-depth and highly-descriptive words, phrases, and passages in this book not only describing scents, but describing the process of capturing nature and managing to put it into alcohol so it eventually makes its way into a glass bottle to be worn by a human.
But this book goes even further than just talking about the mainstream perfume industry, because Vic Fowler also has an off-the-books commission-only perfume business… and the commissions are definitely illegal. And that’s where this book, also like Lolita, becomes elevated to something both darker and more satirical than just your regular thriller. Because the rich can have any perfume they want, legal or illegal. But what if they want the memory of a person? They pay a perfumer whose business is on the rocks for the privilege. But what if it doesn’t stop there? What other scents or memories can their money buy? And to what lengths will out narrator allegedly go to in order to perfect his art, to meet these challenges, and to cover all of his tracks?
Donnelly obviously did her research and put hard work and devotion into this book. It shows with every page she wrote. The writing is precise, and I love morally ambiguous, unreliable narrators. Vic Fowler’s vanity is only outmatched by his narcissism. I both hate him and admire him. When he seemingly commits to a course of action he commits, but when he tells us what he’s done, I of course don’t know if he’s telling us the truth or just trying to make himself look better. That’s the beauty and the horror of an unreliable narrator. You just want things to be easy. You just want to lean into the narrative and not question it. But that’s letting the narrator seduce you. Do you really want to be that easy of a mark? I don’t, so I admire their audacity and hate them for it at the same time. It’s a much more thoughtful and satisfying read that way.
I'd like to thank NetGalley and Thomas & Mercer for granting my request to review this title. ...more
Call it a rom-com for cynics. Call it a romance novel for misanthropes. Whatever you call it, call it brilliant as well, because it really is. This boCall it a rom-com for cynics. Call it a romance novel for misanthropes. Whatever you call it, call it brilliant as well, because it really is. This book was everything it was hyped up to be, and yet it was somehow even better, owing to Crosley’s incredible prose. At times deeply philosophical before taking a turn for the equally deep emotional (or vice versa) before turning delightfully wry, achingly raw, or even throbbing with rage, there are narrative passages in this book that absolutely took my breath away.
I love the very idea of this book. If you’ve ever had friends or family that are just too invested in your love life, then you only know a fraction of what Lola (our main character, who is just about done with all the Lola references people can make) is going through in this book. I love how Crosley took that idea and just turned it up to 11. Combine that idea with the concept of a mash-up of “This is Your Life/”A Christmas Carol”/”High Fidelity” and you’ve got… well, you’ve got “Cult Classic”. And the world is all the better for it.
Crosley’s talents don’t only apply to prose, either. Her dialogue is quick, bright, and witty: fencing as speech. Lunge, parry, riposte, repeat. Watch your footwork. If you’re not smiling or laughing when conversations are being had in this book, you’ll be thinking, because there are a lot of emotional and thoughtful conversations to be had in this book.
Like all New York-centric books, I deeply appreciate how Crosley uses this book to write a love/hate letter to the isle of Manhattan. You can tell the difference when someone writes a book about New York and has an idealized vision of the place and when someone has actually lived in its bones.
Pick this book up. It’s about love, but it’s not romantic. It gives romance the finger and is the better for it.
Thanks to NetGalley, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and MCD for granting me early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review. ...more
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