Friday, August 31, 2018

2018 book 133

Claire Legrand's Furyborn
Hey, it's the start of another fantasy trilogy about queens with magical powers etc etc. This is a pretty good entry in the genre, focusing on a young woman who is revealed to be the prophesied Sun Queen, and has to prove herself through seven trials, and then another young woman a thousand years later who knows the legend of the Sun Queen but has her own stuff to deal with, namely being a morally ambiguous assassin who is also one of those stubbornly stupid YA characters. I got a pretty strong Queen of the Tearling vibe, which is generally a good thing. Parts of this were easy to predict and some of the romances were underbaked, and I’ll give a general warning that some of this is grim, but I'm interested enough to read the next in this series. B/B+.

Wednesday, August 29, 2018

2018 book 132

Melina Marchetta's Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil
It's been long enough since I read this that the details were pretty murky, which meant it was the perfect time for a reread! This is sort of a mystery but more of a story about families, loss, justice, and love. It centers on a disgraced London police officer whose teen daughter's school trip is interrupted by a bomb--a bomb that may be related to a bombing from years ago. And so some higher ups ask him to do some informal investigating, to find some missing kids and figure out what the heck is going on. There are so many great moments here and I love all of the teens, especially the surly ones. Marchetta does write the best teenagers. Anyway, this book makes me sob buckets and I love it.

Tuesday, August 28, 2018

2018 book 131

K.E. Ormsbee's The House in Poplar Wood
The plot of this one is a little weird to explain so bear with me: there are two boys, twin brothers, and their father works for Death and their mother for Memory, and each has one son as an assistant, and because of an Agreement the two sides can never meet, living in a house divided in two. Until a local girl decides she needs their help to solve a MURDER (this isn't really a mystery, though) and the three of them determine to change their town, and their fates. Really good stuff! I could have done without the minor romance subplot but enjoyed all the family stuff a lot. A-.

Monday, August 27, 2018

2018 book 130

Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver
I loved this so much when I first read it that I made book club read it as soon as possible just so I could reread it. And even having read it before, it's still the sort of story that just hooks you and you sink right into it. I like that Novik centered this in a (more or less) specific place and time in history, unlike the vague Eastern European forest of Uprooted, because making it explicitly about Jews in Lithuania in the pre-war years adds a large chunk of verisimilitude. Anyway, the story itself is a sort of take on Rumplestiltskin, focusing on the Jewish daughter of a moneylender who says she can turn silver into gold . . . and then the local gold-stealing fairies come for her. There are several other POV characters, primarily women struggling to make the best of their limited options, but also a couple of interesting males, who help round out the story. Anyway, I love this, it makes me cry, it’s awesome, great ladies, etc etc, A.

Saturday, August 25, 2018

2018 book 129

Rebecca Roanhorse's Trail of Lightning 
I feel like I have been waiting to read this book FOREVERRRRRR, especially as Roanhorse's short story "Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience TM" was sweeping up all the speculative fiction awards this season. I kind of worried that I had expectations that were too high going into this, but it lived up to them and then some. It's a post-apocalyptic urban fantasy type deal (or whatever the Western non-actually-urban version is), steeped in Native American folklore. It centers on a young woman with mysterious powers who is a monster-hunter--because while most of the world has collapsed, the gods and monsters of Navajo culture have risen. Parts of this are pretty dark and violent, which is not usually my thing, but I found the protagonist and the other characters tamd their journeys to be interesting enough to keep going. This is the first in a series and I look forward to seeing what happens next. A-.

Wednesday, August 22, 2018

2018 book 128

Rosie Walsh's Ghosted
Based on the reviews, I wasn't sure going into this whether it was a women's fiction sort of thing, or a thriller. It centers on a thirtysomething woman who has a whirlwind romance with a man over the course of a week, but she KNOWS it was something real, and when he doesn't get in touch after a quick vacation, she KNOWS something is very wrong. Anyway, not to give much away, but it does turn out to be a women's fiction sort of story, the kind that I find overly ridiculous. It lags in the middle but once the reveals start coming it does pick up a bit. Still, fairly ridiculous. B.

Sunday, August 19, 2018

2018 book 127

Seanan McGuire's Night and Silence
For a while there, I had grown disenchanted with this series, which kept throwing curveballs instead of coming to any sort of conclusion. But now I am just leaning into it, which is good, because this twelfth volume of the Toby Daye series has curveballs galore (it also has way too many characters, so the plot occasionally screeches to a halt so there can be exposition about something that happened several books ago). Anyway, in this one, Toby's daughter has been kidnapped . . . again. And the usual band of misfits is on the case! As ever, the sea witch remains my favorite character, but the whole team is great (I at first typed “a lot of fun” but several of them are dealing with PTSD at this point so maybe not). B+.

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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in September.

2018 book 126

Vanessa Hua's A River of Stars
Well, this was pretty GREAT. It's centered on a young Chinese woman, pregnant, whose married boyfriend sends her to the US to have their baby--and then she decides to find a new life for herself. I did have to keep putting this down because I was dreading all the bad things that COULD happen, but things progressed in a way I didn’t expect. I did find the very end a bit disappointing, but this is still a really engaging story about immigration and motherhood. B+.


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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book is available now.

Thursday, August 16, 2018

2018 book 125

Gail Carriger's Competence
After my last couple of reads, I was in the mood for something on the fluffier side, which this decidedly is. It's part of the Custard Protocol series, but instead of focusing on the girl from the first two, it centers more on her best friend Primrose, who I found much much more interesting (and adorable). Or maybe I was just more invested in the romantic plot here, seeing as it involves a WERELIONESS!!! Get it, girl! (Which applies to both of them, really.) Prim's twin brother gets more to do here and is more interesting as well, and I enjoyed the friendships between the three of them. This one was also funnier than its predecessors, particularly every scene that involves a fez. Anyway, I liked this a lot, it was very cute and fun, check it out if you like adventures on floating dirigibles and vampires and lady romances and found families. A/A-.

Tuesday, August 14, 2018

2018 book 124

Tana French's The Witch Elm
This is French's first stand-alone (outside her Dublin Murder Squad series) and it feels . . . unexpected. It’s the story of a man in his late 20s, a happy go lucky guy with a good job and a great girlfriend. Everything goes his way. Until a burglary in his apartment leaves him with a traumatic brain injury and other assorted issues, and he goes to live with his uncle who's dying of cancer, and a skull turns up in the garden. French builds up to all that, though. I will say that I did find the narrative voice very compelling, and the mystery was interesting enough, but a very ugly scene at the end felt out of place to me and kind of turned me off. I understand WHY it’s included, I suppose, but it didn’t work for me. It just left me feeling a bit disconcerted. I guess this is more of a psychological portrait than a straight mystery, and it is well written, but I don’t think I’ll be revisiting it. B+.

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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in October.
Content warning for threats of sexual violence and a lot of other violence.

Monday, August 13, 2018

2018 book 123

Joanna Cannon's Three Things About Elsie 
I actually finished this last night on the plane, but still haven’t decided how I feel about it. It’s centered on an 80-something woman in an assisted living facility in England, who has fallen and is waiting to be rescued, and in the meantime is narrating her recent adventures—starting with the arrival of a new resident, who she’s convinced is someone who supposedly died in the 50s, using a false name for nefarious purposes. This is an interesting portrayal of dementia, and the parts from the POVs of two of the facility's staff round out the picture. And I like the little connections Cannon makes throughout the story. But I just found the ending to be a bit muddled, despite having guessed one aspect of it on page three. Not to say I wasn’t crying about it on an airplane (apologies to the teen girl next to me), and I didn’t need the story wrapped up in a bow, but I’m not sure it actually made sense. Still, pretty entertaining and touching stuff. B+.

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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book is available now.

Tuesday, August 07, 2018

2018 book 122

Martha Wells' Exit Strategy
In the fourth (and final?) Murderbot novella, Murderbot has to go on a RESCUE MISSION!!!! Ugh, I love this series, Murderbot is such a great character and Wells does such a good job with the action and plotting. If you are someone who is maybe not into hard sci fi but like the Becky Chambers books, this is definitely a series to look into. I can’t wait to see what Wells does next. A/A-.

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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in October.

2018 book 121

Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera's What If It's Us
Aaaaaaahhh this was SO CUTE. It’s about two teen boys who meet-cute at a post office in NYC, with each author handling one boy's POV. Obviously I was all in on Albertalli's excitable musical theater nerd, but Silvera's more insecure and quiet guy (secretly writing an epic fantasy novel starring himself) won me over big-time too.  I am often not into YA romances because they are predictable and overwrought, but this avoids a lot of those traps, and even if it didn’t, the world needs more YA romances with queer kids. Race and class issues come up as well, and I also appreciated the way the authors depicted the characters' friendships. Super cute all around. A/A-.

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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in October.

Sunday, August 05, 2018

2018 book 120

Sara Gran's The Infinite Blacktop
A big YAY for a new book in Gran's Claire DeWitt series, about a troubled woman who is the world's best detective, with some eccentric methodology. (That makes this series sound quirky, but really it is dark and weird and wonderful.) In this one, someone is trying to kill Claire, and she has to figure out who, and why. This is interspersed with flashbacks to earlier in her career, when she is working on a cold case involving a dead artist, as well as flashbacks to her childhood as part of a group of Girl Detectives. I really hope Gran is planning more in this series, because I find it completely captivating. A.

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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in September.

Friday, August 03, 2018

2018 book 119

Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic
The library finally added a ton of new e-books this week, but this book (and its new prequel) both became available from my holds as well, and I was in the mood for a story about witchy sisters. I was sure I had read this years ago, but can find no evidence that is true, and I'm not sure I've seen all of the movie either. Anyway, it wasn’t quite what I was expecting; I liked that most of it focused on the family relationships, but found the romances to be a little much. I wanted more witchiness though! Accept your destiny as witches! B.

Wednesday, August 01, 2018

2018 book 118

Busy Philipps' This Will Only Hurt a Little
I have read a lot of memoir/essay books by funny ladies, and often they do have very funny parts, but others fall flat on the page (I imagine the audiobooks are better). This one, however, was GREAT. I am a long-time fan of Philipps (and have been rewatching Cougar Town lately to boot) and her narrative voice here comes across as a very honest conversation (and is also very funny). It gets super real at times—I cried at least twice when she was talking about her very relatable and awful teen years. And all her showbiz stories are great and hilarious. Unsurprisingly, James Franco IS an asshole, and Michelle Williams is a sweetheart. I still have never seen Dawson's Creek but I loved hearing her talk about North Carolina! AND did you know she co-wrote Blades of Glory? Anyway. All those stories were great, but her writing style draws you in so much that you are viscerally angry when she is angry, and devastated when things don’t work out for her, and cheering when they do, even the smaller things. It’s really well done and I can’t wait to see her upcoming talk show. A/A-.

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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in October.