This book killed me. Massacred me. From swooning highs to sobbing lows, I was destroyed and remade by this book.
This book reminded me so much of whatThis book killed me. Massacred me. From swooning highs to sobbing lows, I was destroyed and remade by this book.
This book reminded me so much of what I love about Rainbow Rowell’s novels: that sweet vulnerability, the harsh truths, the blazing fire that is love, fierce friendships, great supporting characters, flawed yet extremely relatable main characters, complex familial dynamics, honest discourse on emotions and mental states, and a whole lot of absolutely beautiful prose and sentence structure.
Of course, in this book we also get some extremely lovely poetry. I honestly teared up at the poems more than once.
This book is better written than most YA romances I’ve read in the past year and has a love story that I simply adore. Our main protagonist, Chase, goes through so much in this book, and I found myself identifying with some of his struggles and feeling all the feels for him when it came to his other struggles. This book does an excellent job of helping the reader understand the concepts of body dysmorphia and identifying as nonbinary without coming across as patronizing or proselytizing, and that’s a huge relief. While a great many people need to be seriously educated on these subjects, this book keeps away from laying it on thick, which makes the whole book and its topics more accessible to the average reader.
I also really need to address the absolutely fantastic manner in which Salvatore addressed the extremely real and extremely toxic topic of body image issues in the LGBTQ community. Adolescent, teen, and young adult males are victims of eating disorders and body image issues in much larger numbers than most people suspect, and that pressure is more than doubled in much of the queer community. Again, the topic is deftly handled by Salvatore, and I’m so glad to see a YA romance novel with LGBTQ themes that also takes the time to talk about an issue not a lot of people realize is a huge problem.
I highly, highly recommend this book if you love LGBTQ romances, college romances, stories of discovering and accepting yourself, fantastic and funny supporting characters, and if you love the writing of authors like Rainbow Rowell and Casey McQuiston.
Thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury YA for early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review. ...more
Sara Cate dedicates this book to “all the good girls”. All I can say is: thank goodness for all the good girls, because this book is both fire and balSara Cate dedicates this book to “all the good girls”. All I can say is: thank goodness for all the good girls, because this book is both fire and balm for the soul of any reader who loves good girls, dominant males, the kink community, and a big helping of praise and affirmation.
I know from experience that sometimes there’s nothing quite like being told you’ve been a good girl. The best girl. The sweetest girl. To be told you’re worth it–whatever “it” is. I also know there’s something about seeing someone being on their knees for you, being so sweet for you, doing anything and everything to please you. Yeah, I’m versatile like that.
A lot of authors write kink-centric books and they don’t feel authentic. They don’t read as authentic. It’s a manufactured experience. And yeah, so maybe that’s fiction and I shouldn’t be surprised, but since I’ve done my time in and out of clubs and parties and dynamics, I know good kink writing when I read it. This novel is the kind of BDSM-centric writing I wish every one of those novels could be, because it actually rang true for once.
Charlie’s curiosity once she discovered who she was working for felt as authentic as my own when I first encountered what some people can and will do behind closed doors (and sometimes not even closed doors, lol). At one point Charlie talks about it like it’s falling down a rabbit hole. To be honest, that’s exactly what it can feel like. Her first experience inside a working club read as honest and familiar from so many stories I’ve heard from fellow players before, and her full-on embrace of submission once she discovered it matches just as many stories. Sometimes, when something fits, it just fits. There’s no shame in that, and I fully believe that was one of Sara’s largest and most firm points in writing this book: don’t be ashamed of what you love, who you love, or what makes you happy. If your happiness comes while kneeling for your millionaire boss, then who’s anyone else to judge?
It’s a wonderful romance novel and an even better love letter to the BDSM community. ...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
“Pull” is actually a compilation of a few bonus scenes that comes after the original novel, “Push”, the novella “Pull”, which follows the Harper-Lockw“Pull” is actually a compilation of a few bonus scenes that comes after the original novel, “Push”, the novella “Pull”, which follows the Harper-Lockwood family as they attend their first Pride parade as a polyamorous throuple, and then a couple of more short stories that come after the time frame set in “Pull”. As the author states: You DO NOT want to read “Pull” if you haven’t read “Push”. Needless to say, you don’t want to skip “Push” anyway, because it’s a brilliant romance novel. One of my favorites of all time, in fact.
I’ve always wished for another novel to come after “Push”, even though I knew Nyla wrapped everything up nice and neat in the original novel, if only because the book was so scorching I just wanted more so I could revel in the hotness of it all. “Pull” does a great job of giving me what I want.. Which is mainly just more Ben and Ryan spicy goodness. I mean, just, whew! *fans self* Holy heck! Those two men! In the original novel they were already fogging up my glasses, but in this they take it to another level! The dirty talk is so on point. We get exhibitionism. We get role play. We get it rough and hard. We get it intense. And I loved it all.
I was surprisingly into the very first bonus scene in the book, which involves Ryan and Tate. I’m not going to spoil it, but for some reason, I thought it was hot. I guess that’s going to be a scene that’s not going to be for everyone, but I like what I like.
I love the dynamic between Ryan and Jess. They’re so similar, but not so similar that they’re the same person. And the way Jess gets turned on by her husbands is so similar to how I feel when I watch two guys makes her a really relatable character.
I’ve been a fan of Nyla K. ever since I read “Push” the first time, and I’m so glad this has been released to a wide audience. Polyamorous throuples deserve more love from the romance community at-large, in my opinion. Hopefully more authors start to pick up on polyamory soon. Us poly people would appreciate it. ...more
Wow. I didn’t expect to have all the feelings I felt while feeling this book. While not the best YA psychological suspense-thriller I’ve read so far tWow. I didn’t expect to have all the feelings I felt while feeling this book. While not the best YA psychological suspense-thriller I’ve read so far this year, it’s right up there near the top.
The most overwhelming feeling I had throughout this book was dread. For two thirds of this book I just felt a huge amount of dread: first on behalf of one character, and then on behalf of another. This book tells four different stories, in a way: two stories of families that were and two stories of families that are. You get to see both sides of the story, but no matter where you look, every facet of this story is so much more complex than what it looks like on the surface.
I feel like, if I had more time to sit on it, I could analyze this whole novel and write you an essay to articulate just how many layers there are to this book, but this is a review for a book release and not a book analysis. Maybe that’s another review for another time when I can read this book on my own time and annotate the whole thing. Trust me, though, the themes of love, loss, grief, mental illness, motherhood, sisterhood, families, domestic violence, and survival are more than enough to keep you involved, intrigued, and turning pages. It’s an absolutely chilling novel about how far some people will go to keep people safe and how far some other people will go to keep people happy. Which is the lesser of two evils? Read it and find out.
Thanks to NetGalley and Sourcebooks Fire for early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review. ...more
Oh how I love books that heavily embed linguistics not only the culture of the people in the book but also so deeply into the very plot of the book! IOh how I love books that heavily embed linguistics not only the culture of the people in the book but also so deeply into the very plot of the book! I may not be a linguist (that title falls to my baby sister), but both she and I grew up with a love of languages and how language evolves over time. This book made me so very happy in my linguistics pants just because it was so clever and almost effortless in how it took the English language and showed how much it could have shifted and then been embedded into the social fabric in the future. I won’t give any examples, because I really don’t want to ruin the fun. Some of the changes are just so downright spot-on they become hilarious. I found myself saying, “Of course that’s what we’d end up calling that in the future!” This book also relies heavily on how technology has changed language on a global scale, with American English, fragmented sentences, and emojis being the most common languages spoken when the digital world is involved.
I am simply mad about this book. It’s one of the best sci-fi novels I’ve read this year, and it’s not even pure sci-fi. It’s also an amateur sleuth mystery, a little bit of a thriller, and a crafty bit of speculative fiction. There are many great points to be made about first contact with an alien civilization: what kind of considerations and how many considerations would we be willing to give to an alien civilization to gain access to their technology, should they come in peace? Would they have an advantage over us once some of us could learn their language and act as translators (in case they didn’t speak out loud, which is the case in this book) because it would give them a buffering time between speaking and then having to hear someone’s reply in which to craft more questions, thoughts, decisions, and answers? Would they have an advantage in composing oneself between one statement and another just by virtue of the translation lag time?
The overall murder mystery plot is an engaging and a twisty road. It’s unpredictable and it seems that just when the mystery might be solved, it’s another red herring or the logic falls apart and we’re a few steps back again. A few steps forward, a stumble back. That’s how this book goes and that’s how I like it. And just when you think all the players have been identified, there’s sure to be another piece put into play or one of the pieces is found to have not been part of it at all. In the end, I was about 85% surprised by who it was. And then I felt like, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Trust me, pick up this book. Then actually read it. If you’re a fan of speculative fiction I can almost guarantee you’ll enjoy it.
Thanks to NetGalley, MacMillan-Tor/Forge, and Tordotcom for granting me early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review. ...more
I’ve sat here staring at my laptop screen for a bit, trying to think of the best way to start out this book review because I just can’t stay away fromI’ve sat here staring at my laptop screen for a bit, trying to think of the best way to start out this book review because I just can’t stay away from the word “ineffable” when it comes to this book. When I pull away from the intricacies and intimacies of the story and look at it from afar, it’s just something so enigmatic and beautiful I simply don’t know where to start with it.
Why don’t I try starting with the plot, boiled down to its base elements? This book is, at its roots, a Great American Road Trip novel. It’s the story of two sisters who decide to set out and find their mother, who has been missing for five years, and now that they’re both adults they decide to find out once and for all what her fate was, because they think they have the tools to do so. This wouldn’t be a special book at all if it weren’t for the sheer, raw talent and imagination of Ruth Emmie Lang.
Characters and atmosphere are what drive this book, and both are magnificent engines. I’d say atmosphere carries slightly more weight than the characters, but that may be due to the fact that Lang’s mesmerizing, earnest, and almost hypnotic prose lends the atmosphere strength, while only half of characterization is carried by prose (the rest being carried by heartfelt, well-written, and sometimes heartbreakingly vulnerable dialogue).
The themes of sisterhood, motherhood, guilt, shame, secrets, and regret are all central to this book, overlaid with mystical melodies surrounding memory, music, birds, and migration. These themes and literary melodies are where the book gets ineffable for me, because I feel I could write a whole essay about how memory, music, birds, and migration patterns all tie into one another, but that would never fit into a book review. This one is running long as it is.
Our two main characters, Finn and Zadie, are both wonderful and heartbreaking to read, with their opposite worldviews and personalities. If you have a sister you might know that feeling of simultaneously wanting to hug them and throttle them but you’ll do whatever it takes to keep them safe. When it comes to their disparate world views regarding their missing mother, you can also see that big sister/little sister dynamic in action as they both regard their mother and her actions in different ways, memories and emotions colored differently by their age when the events happened and whether or not they were there when certain things happened. It causes strife and discord as Zadie tries to shield and protect Finn from what happened in the last six months their mother was around before she disappeared, but it’s hard to stop those protective instincts, and you can feel the weight of Zadie’s emotions regarding the matter.
Yes, I cried.
There are fabulous interludes throughout the book as Zadie and Finn travel from Texas to Washington in their endeavor to find their mom, from stargazing in Arizona to communing with trees in the Cascades. Every new supporting character that’s brought into the story contributes something significant to the story and never takes away from the plot or feels like filler material. It’s just one more stepping stone and one more mile to go.
I simply loved it. Everything about it. It was compelling from the first sentence, reeling me in immediately and it kept me captivated to the very end. It won’t disappoint you.
Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for granting me access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review.
File Under: Coming of Age/Magical Realism/New Adult/Mystery ...more
Confession time: Even though I own the Cursebreakers Trilogy in ebook format, I haven’t had a chance to read it yet (I know, I know), so I went into tConfession time: Even though I own the Cursebreakers Trilogy in ebook format, I haven’t had a chance to read it yet (I know, I know), so I went into this book knowing it was a spinoff of that universe and it would help if I read that series first. I simply didn’t have time but felt confident I could probably pick up the threads pretty quickly like I did with Bardugo’s Six of Crows duology. Thankfully, I was right. It was pretty easy to pick up the threads and I’m so glad. I’d have hated to have had to wait to sit down and read Cursebreakers (I still plan on reading it! I’m just short on time right now!) before I read this book.
It’s such a good book! Easily one of the best fantasy reads I’ve come across this year. It doesn’t come quite as close to the level of enjoyment I found in reading Laura Sebastian’s “Castles in Their Bones”, but it’s not that far behind (Don’t hit me with SJM’s latest release–I have it but haven’t had the time to touch that behemoth either!). I love the LGBTQ and disabled representation up front and center. I love the found family aspect (frankly, I’m loving this wave of found family in YA fiction overall that we’ve been seeing over the past few years, which I could probably write a whole essay on).
From the start I was really digging the none-too-subtle parallels between the set-up for this book and the events of the January 6th attempted insurrection here in the US. The notion of the “Truthbringers” taking advantage of poor and rural communities and their ignorance to plant and sow seeds of mistrust and doubt in order to grow a population ready and willing to commit treason? Taking advantage of their desperation in order to gain favor and garner a twisted form of trust and obligation in order to trap them into feeling like they needed to stay quiet and do what they’re told in order to stay in your good graces? Kemmerer pulled no punches with the allegory, and I’m glad for it. It was a slick move for a plot line. It drew me into the story with little effort and helped me to identify with the characters in a way nothing else would.
I love the way Kemmerer does her narrative prose and the way her characters recall things that are said. It’s not done in the typical narrative manner and it really stands out. I also love how a lot of the symbolism in her books is double-sided and much of the morality is gray. It’s messy, but it’s true. I like my books that way.
Thanks to NetGalley, Bloomsbury Children’s, and Bloomsbury YA for granting me early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review. ...more
Excuse me, but can I just sit here and swoon for a moment?
Okay, maybe more than a moment, because I adored this book. It was absolutely fabulous.
WasExcuse me, but can I just sit here and swoon for a moment?
Okay, maybe more than a moment, because I adored this book. It was absolutely fabulous.
Was it predictable? Yes. Was the worldbuilding robust or the magic system fascinating? Not really. But is this girl an absolute sucker for romantasy centered on political intrigues and secrets? Heck yes. Do I have a thing for competency in my main characters? Heck to the yes!
A Strange and Stubborn Endurance is definitely a character-driven romantasy, with a decent plot riding behind all of that lovely character development. Usually this would upset me, especially when a book is as long as this one is. I found, though, that I enjoyed every single page of this book and soaked it up like the first sunniest days after winter because of all the LGBTQ+ issues and the way Velasin (one of our MMCs) not only dealt with his own personal demons but also learned all about his new home and how he might fit in there.
Watching he and Caethari (our other MMC) first form a friendship out of something desperate and ineffable and letting it patiently evolve as the pair negotiate adventures (and misadventures), intrigues, sweet moments and sour, horrors, times of great pain, and so much more throughout the book is not only interesting but it’s moving. Their courtship is mostly one-sided, but it’s not an unwelcome one. They’re drawn together by circumstance but also by sheer chemistry.
It’s a romantic book first and a fantasy book second, but put it together and it’s just completely magical without even trying too hard. Foz Meadows wrote a fantastic story about love, family, and the dangers of reaching too far and too high.
File Under: 5 Star Review/Book Series/Fantasy/Romantasy/Fantasy Series/LGBTQ Fantasy/LGBTQ Romance/OwnVoices ...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
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
I’m not usually one for military fiction (I love military non-fiction, though), but the blurb for this book caught me with its premise of a British woI’m not usually one for military fiction (I love military non-fiction, though), but the blurb for this book caught me with its premise of a British woman who is unwilling to sit by and accept her fiance had simply gone missing at the Battle of Somme (during WWI, for those who aren’t in the know) and decides to spirit herself away without telling her family to travel to France in order to keep the promise to return his body to England. At the same time, there is a concurrent and intertwined storyline about a British military captain who, along with Amy (our female protagonist), stumble upon the scene of what would be considered an egregious war crime on the part of the British Army while seeking a possible spot where Amy’s missing fiance might be found.
The blurb makes it sound like the main storyline and interest lies with Captain Mazkenzie and his endeavor to get to the bottom of what happened at Two Storm Wood, but in truth it’s Amy and her indefatigable, determined, and tenacious search for the truth about her missing fiance and what happened at Two Storm Wood that truly carry this amazing book. Stalwart with love and burdened by guilt, Amy marches through sodden battlefields, sees the worst horrors of war, endures horrible conditions among hostile and period-typical misogynistic males because she simply cannot accept the word “missing” when it comes to the man she loves.
The narrative in this book pulls no punches. We get to see the horrors of war and the aftermath both through the eyes of the soldiers and through what Amy sees in her travels: war hospitals filled the sick, the damaged, the dying, and the dead. We get detailed and well-researched sections of the book that put us readers directly in the trenches, dugouts, and battlefields as the Battle of Somme rages on. Most of all, we get to see the horrors and wreckage of war without varnish. This isn’t a pretty book, but it’s a dang good one.
Last of all? This book is indeed thrilling. It’s tense, driven, and does manage to keep surprising you. And what is war if not thrilling all on its own? WWI was horrifying, and this book won’t let you forget it.
Thanks to NetGalley and W. W. Norton 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
If diabetics need insulin to regulate their blood sugar, then Ruby needs murder to regulate the self-imposed ethical rules by which she lives her lifeIf diabetics need insulin to regulate their blood sugar, then Ruby needs murder to regulate the self-imposed ethical rules by which she lives her life. Just as she refuses to sleep with more men than her age (so, if she’s 24, she refuses to sleep with a 25th man until she turns 25), she finds that after a wide spread of time (about a decade or so), she finds the need to either commit or cause a death to happen. She doesn’t feel guilt, remorse, or concern over these deaths. To her, they simply needed to happen, so she ensured they did, and the world is better off without these people anyway. A bully when she’s 5. A rapist when she’s a young adult. A bigoted and violent woman who treats her employees like slaves once she’s fully grown and an established professional.
She’s either outright guilty of some form of murder or had a hand in the death in all three of these people, but what this book is about is the one death she had absolutely nothing to do with: the death of her husband, who died of low blood sugar in his sleep on the first night she had gotten a full night of deep sleep at home in what felt like forever after a week-long retreat on teaching Type-A personalities how to relax and let go.
Ruby has emotions like anyone else. The deaths she helped cause or had a hand in came about because, after internal analysis, she felt these people would only do more damage in the long run if they lived, so dying now would save everyone a whole lot of trouble. Hence why she carries no guilt or remorse over those deaths. They were, ultimately, necessary and a public service. No one ever need know. So she’s ultimately shocked and bemused when the police haul her in for her husband’s death when she had absolutely nothing at all to do with it. Type I diabetics die in their sleep from low blood sugar often enough there’s a moniker for it, “Dead in Bed”. That doesn’t stop her from being frozen in amber before she can even start her grieving process because the cops are laying the death at her door, despite the medical examiner’s findings that the husband died naturally of “Dead in Bed”.
What I loved about this book so much is how human Ruby is. Rothschild goes to great lengths to weave a completely mundane, intimate, almost-normal but somewhat-extraordinary personal life story for Ruby: adores her sister, higher-than-normal IQ, a preternatural talent for reading people she’s never even met before, a great judge of character, hates clutter, loves routine, her favorite color is purple and you will never change her mind, doesn’t second-guess herself, and once she sets on a path she doesn’t deviate. There are so many little things revealed here and there during the book that humanize Ruby we feel as if we’ve known her forever by the time the book ends. Heck! I wanted to be her friend! How human she is makes the things she’s done seem almost just like a quirk of hers–something she just needs to do to equalize herself every decade or so, and it’s always someone who really deserves it. I found myself going, “Well, honestly… I can’t say she was really all that wrong in what she did there.” Do I feel bad about thinking that? No, not really. Should I? I don’t even know at this point.
This book is a mind trip. It’s narrated in first-person POV, so I could write this off as unreliable narration. But I don’t. I don’t find Ruby to be unreliable. I don’t find she has the appropriate mens rea to be an unreliable narrator. No motive. She has no reason to lie to us readers. The plot has nothing to do with the crimes she actually committed: it has everything to do with the one crime she didn’t commit. And that’s the irony of it all. Rothchild could’ve gone for the jugular and wrote us the story of this serial killer in slow-motion, but instead we got the story of a grieving widow who had lived an incredibly interesting life and was being put on trial for the one murder she didn’t commit.
I highly recommend this sharp suspense mystery. It’s worth every page.
Thanks to NetGalley, Penguin Publishing Group, and G. P. Putnam’s Sons for early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review. ...more
I was absolutely flippity-freaking-thrilled when I found out Sara and Rachel were writing a sequel to the very first (and still one of my absolutely fI was absolutely flippity-freaking-thrilled when I found out Sara and Rachel were writing a sequel to the very first (and still one of my absolutely favorite) reverse-harem novels, “Four”. For the longest time, I think most of us had thought “Four” would stay as a standalone, and we were okay with that because Sara and Rachel both consistently put out quality material, but to hear they were going to give us a sequel? That was so exciting I pre-ordered it the day it was announced.
So, as you can expect, I had very high expectations for this book. Did it meet them? Heck yes it did! It not only met them–it exceeded them. It took everything I loved about “Four” and elevated it. It took it higher. Iris was fiercer, Silas was more protective, Baron was more passionate, and Gabriel was… well, more Gabriel (and I just when I thought I couldn’t love my sweet little torture bunny more). And then, well… I won’t spoil that for you.
There was the perfect amount of angst for me: not so much I felt like it was dragging the book into the ground and not so little I felt like the characters were taking the situation too lightly. The characters themselves were consistently carried over from the first book as necessary and new characters were well fleshed-out and extremely well-written. The plot was nicely woven into the plot from the first book and carried out to its conclusion in this book, and it ended on the perfect note.
Thank you, Sara and Rachel, for an incredible duology. Thank you for these characters and thank you for the love and time you put into them. I know I will miss them (but thank goodness I have the books for the memories)! ...more
If this fantastic, imaginative, riveting, castigating, captivating, intense, passionate, diverse, and grotesque novel is only Andrew Joseph White’s deIf this fantastic, imaginative, riveting, castigating, captivating, intense, passionate, diverse, and grotesque novel is only Andrew Joseph White’s debut effort in the mad, mad, mad, mad world of literary publishing, I cannot wait to see what he has in store for us next, because this book was not only worth the wait, but it exceeded expectations.
I’m going to go ahead and admit that I would need some time to sit and marinate with this book to give you a really good rundown of all the metaphors, parallels, and themes that run rampant all over this book. The double-sided meanings behind every Bible passage quoted and the intention behind their repetitiveness. The evolution from larvae to final form, in more ways than one. The completely justified castigation of evangelical Christianity and their hypocrisy versus the open arms with which the LGBTQIA+ community welcomes everyone and takes them in as a member of their tribe. This has always been the way of the queer community, and it always will be. When religious families kick their queer children, teens, and young adults out of their homes, the LGBTQIA+ community has a long tradition of taking these lost and often broken strays with them to safety and shelter whenever possible. This book illuminates this quite clearly. Even if it’s evident the apocalypse may be coming quite soon, the local queer community has come together and not only managed to find each other, but to stay alive and to prop each other up at the end of the world.
I couldn’t have adored more the queer representation in this book. I think maybe the only letters I didn’t see represented were B and I. And hey, that’s okay! We got more than one trans character in there, and that’s a miracle in and of itself when it comes to mainstream publishing houses.
This book is horrific in many ways, but it’s not scary. The horror comes purely from two sources: what people will do in the name of religion (which is nothing new) and body horror/gore. I say this with one caveat: PLEASE READ THE CONTENT WARNING AT THE BEGINNING OF THE BOOK. This is AJW’s request, as there is a great deal of material in this book that could be triggering to queer youth. I don’t normally include content warnings in my reviews, but since the author himself wants to be sure people read it, I’m gonna go ahead and sling it in here.
I seriously recommend you give this book a shot. It’s horrific but absolutely justified in its righteous anger. Have you ever felt enough rage over the way LGBTQIA+ people are treated that you wished you could rain down a little hellfire on those who oppress them? Believe me, this book will give you a little taste of that.
Thanks to NetGalley and Peachtree Teen for granting me early access to this book 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
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
The first thing you need to know about this book is that it is INTERESTING. It’s unlike any other book I’ve read in this genre and in the YA category The first thing you need to know about this book is that it is INTERESTING. It’s unlike any other book I’ve read in this genre and in the YA category in general for as long as I can remember. For that alone, this book would bring this book three stars, simply for attempting something outside the status quo and putting the time and effort into researching this era in Korean history and these historical figures enough to create an interesting historical fiction mystery around them.
The second thing you need to know is that it gets to five stars by being utterly EXCELLENT at telling this story. The prose is elegant. The characters are well-developed and easy to identify with. The mystery is intriguing and well-plotted. The culprit is well-hidden. The subplot romance is understated the right amount and developed organically. The pacing and editing is well-done. There seem to be no plot holes and little to no loose ends. The book is neither too long nor too short. It’s all just so well-told and interesting I couldn’t find it in myself to put it down. ...more
This series, from beginning to end, has been such a joy to read: Petit four-sized treats of dirty, spicy romance that have titillated and delighted meThis series, from beginning to end, has been such a joy to read: Petit four-sized treats of dirty, spicy romance that have titillated and delighted me ever since I started reviewing these titles about midway through the series. But I’m not here to review the series. I’m here to review the last installment in the Master Class series: Choose. This is Juliette’s tenth lesson… and it was a long time coming.
As with all the Master Class novellas, going into the plot at all is just kind of a spoiler from the outset, but if you read the previous installment you know it ended with Juliette flying off with her fiance to Paris while Malcolm being just minutes too late to stop their plane. And that’s where Choose picks up… just as the plane to Paris is lifting into the air.
I don’t care that Paris is, as in most books, over-romanticized. That’s a trivial matter here. What counts here is the push and pull within Juliette as she is caught between what she was born for and what she truly wants. The man she was trained to serve or the man that taught her everything she knows? The man who bought her or the man that took her as she was and shaped her into the woman she has become? Duty or love? Expectations of her or what she truly desires? Deep down, what does she know she can’t live without?
Bridges once burned are mended. Certain characters show their true colors. Sacrifices are made. And HEAs? Guaranteed....more
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