Read
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The Cuckoo
Finished
I really enjoyed this one. The series was fun, but I think this had some of the best, most evocative scenes in the series. The pacing to the end of the book was a little strange, a little anticlimactic, but oddly, I found I kind of appreciated that – not a tidy bow on a series that didn’t have a clearly desirable outcome.
I’m painfully aware of how fantasy is used – often unintentionally – as a vessel for smuggling right-wing and racist ideologies; and a series that centered on two explicitly western European, mostly Anglo, societies trying to genocide each other, with strong Nordic influence and themes deeply intwined with toxic masculinity, is certainly not immune to those criticisms. But in the end, I think it could have been much worse in that regard. Bellamus was a fascinating and sympathetic antagonist, and while men definitely outnumbered women in the story, at least a few women have strength and agency, and the men were generally layered and human. Not a perfect book in that regard, for sure, but far from an outlier in the subgenre.
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Love, Mom
Finished
This was such a perplexing read for me: the central idea is really fun for a thriller, but the execution is awful. I had the twist figured out long, long before it came. People use awkwardly sanitized language. So many uses of “freaking,” and her dad, drunk and bitter, says her mom was “shagging” someone else—this book all takes place in the US, in the present day. But this book has murder, SA, drug use, sex (references, not acts), so it’s not like the language is sanitized to make it PG.
The premise is a bit silly as many thrillers are, but the way it unfolds is even more cartoonish. The pacing gets weird, there’s essentially no climax, and then much of the mystery is just resolved in epilogues.
The way the author treats EJ, I was certain he’d turn out to be bad – my theory was that he was the child given up for adoption – but no, it’s just an excessively cheesy love story side plot. And dad going to prison for life? Did I hear that right? Nah. Silly. A fun story, somewhat disorientingly written.
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A Conspiracy of Truths
Finished
A delightful read. The whimsical storytelling style, in the voice of the protagonist—very much in the vein of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams—could easily be something that took me out of the book, because a voice like that is hard to make natural; but it was very well executed. The constrained first-person perspective had me wishing, at times, to get out and see the world a bit more; but I enjoyed it all the same.
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Things Don't Break on Their Own
Finished
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The Second Rebel
Finished
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Forever and a Day A James Bond Novel
Finished
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You Must Be New Here
Finished
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The Red Winter
Finished
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Abandon
Finished
I’ve enjoyed Blake Crouch’s other works and so I picked this one up, and I suppose I regret it. Boring, poorly-paced—things only start to kick off like 60% or 70% of the way through the book—and not entertaining in the process. Sometimes the plot takes a while but the characters get you there; this was not one of those times. Maybe in part I just don’t enjoy the Old West as a setting, so I guess that’s on me. I’ll probably still read more of his work, but he’s become a better writer since this one, and come up with more compelling premises.
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Eulalia!
Finished
Wanted to revisit one of my favorite childhood series. Listened to an audiobook that was voiced by Jacques and “A Full Cast,” and surprisingly I think that hurt rather than helped my enjoyment. Part of it is simply that I listen to audiobooks at a higher speed, and the range of voices and accents didn’t do well in those circumstances: if I listened at 1x it was definitely too slow, but the voices were not a uniform speed, so a reasonable speed for the book was still too fast for certain characters. Jacques’s low Liverpudlian accent is lovely, but can also be hard to make out when, e.g., driving. So that’s obviously not a criticism of the book, but it did affect my enjoyment. The book overall felt a little strangely paced, without a clear rising action and climax. Few of the characteristic feasts, and actually very little time at Redwall at all. It was alright, but certainly not my favorite of the series.
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Blood of the Chosen
Finished
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Guilty by Definition
Finished
An enjoyable mystery. The puzzles were fun, and felt like I might have figured some of them out if I had been reading instead of listening; but let’s be honest, probably not. Those and the overall linguistic angle added a fun background to a somewhat standard “ghosts of the past” type mystery.
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The Knight and the Moth
Finished
This was a fun and engaging world. It kind of straddled the line between a fairy tale and a more standard fantasy, and I guess I found that a little disorienting because there are different tropes, different expectations for each. At times, it seemed like the obvious next question was not asked, or next discovery was not discovered – the latter could be chalked up to subverting expectations, but the not so much the former. I think that’s where the genre confusion came in: fairy tales often just kind of skip over the details and you have to roll with it, but this felt a bit more grounded, so those missed details stood out.
The twist at the very end was simultaneously obvious and extremely frustrating: give us a minute with our victory, come on! -
Long Bright River
Finished
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A Drop of Corruption An Ana and Din Mystery
Finished