Month: September 2021

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books and reading

The Time Traveler’s Wife

Title: The Time Traveler’s Wife

Author: Audrey Niffenegger

Genre: magical realism

PopSugar Challenge Prompt: A book everyone but you has read (it has over 1 million ratings on Goodreads)

I have no idea why people latched on to this book. How in the world did this book earn over a million ratings? It’s a good book but nothing spectacular. I definitely don’t get the hype. It was creative, sure, but I won’t read it again and only gave it four stars. Honestly, the book creeped me out at times. An older man looking at a child (his future wife, but still….) with googly eyes. Eh, just didn’t work for me.

From Goodreads: Audrey Niffenegger’s innovative debut, The Time Traveler’s Wife, is the story of Clare, a beautiful art student, and Henry, an adventuresome librarian, who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-three and Henry thirty-one. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself misplaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity in his life, past and future. His disappearances are spontaneous, his experiences unpredictable, alternately harrowing and amusing.

The Time Traveler’s Wife depicts the effects of time travel on Henry and Clare’s marriage and their passionate love for each other as the story unfolds from both points of view. Clare and Henry attempt to live normal lives, pursuing familiar goals—steady jobs, good friends, children of their own. All of this is threatened by something they can neither prevent nor control, making their story intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.

The concept was really interesting. Poor Henry, at any moment, will disappear leaving his clothes and any object (like a tooth filling) behind. Though, it’s quite convenient to the plot that he has to learn to steal clothes, pick locks, and turn into an escape artist. And he goes back in time to familiar locations, his childhood home, his work place, and his wife’s childhood home. He sees her throughout her entire life, starting when she’s six. Their love is one for the storybooks, and Clare is a great character. But this book was just good for me. I can’t really explain why I didn’t love it, but I’ve definitely read better love stories.

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The Final Girl Support Group

Title: The Final Girl Support Group

Author: Grady Hendrix

Genre: thriller/horror

Thank you Netgalley for this copy!

Wow, did Grady Hendrix knock it out of the park again. I’ve only read The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, which I also loved, and definitely need to back to his previous books. I couldn’t read this one quickly enough. I was dying (pun intended) to get to the end. Lynette, the main character, is a final girl. Meaning she was the last girl standing at the end of slasher-movie type event, but a real-life one. Of course, they made movies about the girls and the horrors they lived through, but these survivors have found each other and attend a monthly support group.

From Goodreads: In horror movies, the final girl is the one who’s left standing when the credits roll. The one who fought back, defeated the killer, and avenged her friends. The one who emerges bloodied but victorious. But after the sirens fade and the audience moves on, what happens to her?

Lynnette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre twenty-two years ago, and it has defined every day of her life since. And she’s not alone. For more than a decade she’s been meeting with five other actual final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, putting their lives back together, piece by piece. That is until one of the women misses a meeting and Lynnette’s worst fears are realized–someone knows about the group and is determined to take their lives apart again, piece by piece.

But the thing about these final girls is that they have each other now, and no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.

Don’t confuse this book with Final Girls by Riley Sager, which is just an okay book. They follow the same basic concept, but that’s about it. Lynette is a badass in this book. And she is jerked around by every other character in various ways, but she keeps standing to protect those around her. The other final girls have their own quirks, but all are survivors. One in particular, though, embraced the dark side, which was my favorite part of the book because of the creepiness. I thought this book was fantastic. It’s suspenseful, horrifying, and such a fun read.

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Black Stars collection

Title/Author: The Visit by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Black Pages by Nnedi Okorafor

2043…A Merman I Should Turn to Be by Nisi Shawl

These Alien Skies by C.T. Rwizi

We Travel the Spaceways by Victor LaValle

Clap Back by Nalo Hopkinson

Genre: Afrofuturism

I’m not a sci-fi person. As much as I try to be, and as much as I fully support the Afrofuturism genre, it’s just not my thing. That said, I do enjoy a book here and there. The Parable of the Sower duology by Octavia Butler is a masterpiece. I also loved her Kindred. But other books in the genre were just okay for me. But that’s just me. If this is your genre of choice, you’ll love this book series found on Amazon.

From Goodreads: The Visit: One night in Lagos, two former friends reunite. Obinna is a dutiful and unsophisticated stay-at-home husband and father married to a powerful businesswoman. Eze is single, a cautious rebel from his university days whose arrival soon upsets the balance in Obinna’s life. In a world where men are constantly under surveillance and subject to the whims of powerful women, more than Obinna’s ordered and accustomed routine might be on the line.

The Black Pages: Issaka has returned home to Timbouctou and a devastating al-Qaeda raid. His only hope for survival is Faro, a stunning, blue-beaded supernatural entity who rises free from the flames of her imprisoning book as it burns. Compelled to follow Faro, Issaka is opening his eyes to their shared history and the ancestral wisdom of his own past.

2043… A Merman I Should Turn to Be: Five miles off the South Carolina coast, Darden and Catherina are getting their promised forty acres, all of it undersea. Like every Black “mer,” they’ve been experimentally modified to adapt to their new subaquatic home—and have met with extreme resistance from white supremacists. Darden has an inspired plan for resolution. For both those on land and the webbed bottom-dwellers below, Darden is hoping to change the wave of the future.

These Alien Skies: Copilots Msizi and Tariro are testing a newly constructed wormhole jump that presumably leads to unsettled habitable worlds. Then an explosion sends them off course, far from where they started and with little chance of ever making it back. Now they’re stranded on their new home for the diaspora. It’s called Malcolm X-b. But they’re beginning to wonder how many light-years from civilization they really are.

Clap Back: Burri is a fashion designer and icon with a biochemistry background. Her latest pieces are African inspired and crafted to touch the heart. They enable wearers to absorb nanorobotic memories and recount the stories of Black lives and forgiveness. Wenda doesn’t buy it. A protest performance artist, Wenda knows exploitation when she sees it. What she’s going to do with Burri’s breakthrough technology could, in the right hands, change race relations forever.

We Travel the Spaceways: Grimace is a homeless man on a holy mission to free Black Americans from emotional slavery. His empty soda cans told him as much. Then he meets Kim, a transgender runaway who joins Grimace on his heroic quest. Is Grimace receiving aluminum missives from the gods, or is he a madman? Kim will find out soon enough on a strange journey they’ve been destined to share.

I loved The Black Pages. The opening page has a quote from Fahrenheit 451 on it, so I was hooked. And yes, it’s about book burning, but it’s so much more than that. I immediately was drawn in to the story, more so than any of the other stories. The Visit was also really great. The tables were turned where the world is a matriarchy. The others were good, but just not for me. Please don’t let that dissuade you, though. These are great stories.

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books and reading

Faraway Collection

Titles and Authors:

The Prince and the Troll by Rainbow Rowell

Hazel and Gray by Nic Stone

The Princess Game by Soman Chainani

The Cleaners by Ken Liu

The Wickeds by Gayle Forman

Genre: fairy tale-ish

I love these short story collections that Amazon puts out. I’ve read the Forward collection (ratings: The Last Conversation 5 stars, Ark 4 stars, Summer Frost 4, Emergency Skin 3, You Have Arrived at Your Destination 3, Randomize 3). I loved the first Nameless collection by Dean Koontz and will dig into the second set shortly. I read the Hush collection (ratings: Treasure 3 stars, Slow Burner 3 stars, The Gift 4 stars, Snowflakes 4, Buried 4, Let Her Be 4). The Out of Line stories are all about women who don’t/won’t fit into a box (ratings: This Telling 4 stars, Graceful Burdens 4 stars, Sweet Virginia 5, The Contractors 4, Halfway to Free 5, Bear Witness 4, Shine, Pamela! Shine 4). This collection was really great. And I’m currently reading the Black Stars collection.

From Goodreads: The Prince and the Troll: It’s fate when a man accidentally drops his phone off the bridge. It’s fortune when it’s retrieved by a friendly shape sloshing in the muck underneath. From that day forward, as they share a coffee every morning, an unlikely friendship blooms. Considering the reality for the man above, where life seems perfect, and that of the sharp-witted creature below, how forever after can a happy ending be?

Hazel and Gray: It’s bad enough that Hazel and Gray have defied the demands of Hazel’s foul stepfather. The Monster has forbidden their romance. Now they’ve awakened in the forest, phones dead, hours past curfew. But not far away is a grand estate in the middle of nowhere. The door is open. In this short story about choosing your own path, the fury of the Monster that awaits them back home may be nothing compared to what lies ahead.

The Princess Game: The victims are the most popular girls in school, each murdered and arranged in a grim fairy-tale tableau. To find the killer, rookie detective Callum Pederson has gone undercover where the Princes hold court. He’s found enough secrets among the bros to bring them in for questioning—but he could very well get lost in the games the Princes play.

The Wickeds: Envious queen? Evil stepmother? Kidnapping hag? Elsinora, Gwendolyn, and Marguerite are through with warts-and-all tabloids, ugly lies, and the three ungrateful brats who pitted them against each other and the world. But maybe there’s more to the stories than even the Wickeds know. Is it time to finally get revenge? After all, they’re due for a happily-enough-ever-after. Even if they have to write it themselves.

The Cleaners: Gui is a professional cleaner at A Fresh Start, scrubbing away the unpleasant layers of memory that build up on the personal objects of his customers. Memory-blind himself, he can’t feel those wounds. Clara can, and she prefers them irretrievable. Until her sister, Beatrice, ultrasensitive to memory, raises one that could change Clara’s mind. For Gui, the past is gone. For Clara and Beatrice, deciding what to remember reaches to the heart of their shared history.

I loved The Cleaners. Hands down the best of the bunch for me. The Wickeds was my least favorite. It was just a little too happily ever after for me. The rest were all four stars, and I really enjoyed them. You could breeze through this collection in a day for sure. Most took me less than 30 minutes to read. If you have Prime and a Kindle (or the app) don’t miss these stories.

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books and reading

The Dante Club

Title: The Dante Club

Author: Matthew Pearl

Genre: historical fiction

PopSugar Reading Challenge prompt: A DNF book from your TBR list

Whew. Well, this one was a DNF for a reason. My goodness, it was just so boring. Sadly, it’s the exact kind of book I’d want to read. I used to teach Inferno. I love reading it. I love teaching it. My students and I had so much fun laughing at Dante’s creative punishments. For example, those who were false flatterers are surrounded by excrement. Those full of shit are then surrounded by it for eternity. It’s also hilarious that Dante put his neighbors that angered him into hell. The Dante Club is also about trying to solve murders that are occurring around Boston. Dante? check! Murders? check. But, gah…. just so dull.

From Goodreads: In 1865 Boston, the literary geniuses of the Dante Club—poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J. T. Fields—are finishing America’s first translation of The Divine Comedy and preparing to unveil Dante’s remarkable visions to the New World. The powerful Boston Brahmins at Harvard College are fighting to keep Dante in obscurity, believing that the infiltration of foreign superstitions into American minds will prove as corrupting as the immigrants arriving at Boston Harbor.

The members of the Dante Club fight to keep a sacred literary cause alive, but their plans fall apart when a series of murders erupts through Boston and Cambridge. Only this small group of scholars realizes that the gruesome killings are modeled on the descriptions of Hell’s punishments from Dante’s Inferno. With the lives of the Boston elite and Dante’s literary future in America at stake, the Dante Club members must find the killer before the authorities discover their secret.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and an outcast police officer named Nicholas Rey, the first black member of the Boston police department, must place their careers on the line to end the terror. Together, they discover that the source of the murders lies closer to home than they ever could have imagined.

The Dante Club is a magnificent blend of fact and fiction, a brilliantly realized paean to Dante’s continued grip on our imagination, and a captivating thriller that will surprise readers from beginning to end.

The concept of this book is the best thing about it. But the delivery is so badly done. The way the Black officer was referred to in the book by a white author bristled me. The style of writing was so much exposition, not enough action. The author clearly needs a lesson show, don’t tell. I really wanted to like this book, but I just didn’t care at all while reading it. With thirty pages left, I could have put the book down, walked away, and had been just fine. That’s a sign of a bummer book. Oh well.

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books and reading

The Prophets

Title: The Prophets

Author: Robert Jones, Jr.

Genre: African-American historical fiction

Oh my, this book. Let me say right now that I absolutely loved it. But it’s not an easy book. The language is complex, but beautiful. The subject is about slavery, so you know going into it how difficult it will be to read about. But please don’t let this stop you from reading it. This story will stick with me for a long time.

From Goodreads: Isaiah was Samuel’s and Samuel was Isaiah’s. That was the way it was since the beginning, and the way it was to be until the end. In the barn they tended to the animals, but also to each other, transforming the hollowed-out shed into a place of human refuge, a source of intimacy and hope in a world ruled by vicious masters. But when an older man—a fellow slave—seeks to gain favor by preaching the master’s gospel on the plantation, the enslaved begin to turn on their own. Isaiah and Samuel’s love, which was once so simple, is seen as sinful and a clear danger to the plantation’s harmony.

With a lyricism reminiscent of Toni Morrison, Robert Jones, Jr. fiercely summons the voices of slaver and the enslaved alike to tell the story of these two men; from Amos the preacher to the calculating slave-master himself to the long line of women that surround them, women who have carried the soul of the plantation on their shoulders. As tensions build and the weight of centuries—of ancestors and future generations to come—culminate in a climactic reckoning, The Prophets masterfully reveals the pain and suffering of inheritance, but is also shot through with hope, beauty, and truth, portraying the enormous, heroic power of love.

It’s hard for me to say you should read this book because xyz reasons. It’s difficult. It’s challenging. It’s complicated. This story isn’t one you’ll fly through. But it’s just a beautiful one. The love between Samuel and Isaiah is one we should all hope to have. The love that when someone looks into your eyes, they see all the way inside you. The love that just by a movement or gesture, they know your emotions. I couldn’t read this book for hours on end. It was just too much. But at no point did I want to step away. I loved this book. Easily one of the best I’ve read this year.

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Grist Mill Road

Title: Grist Mill Road

Author: Christopher J. Yates

Genre: thriller

I’m reading a really dense book right now and needed something a bit lighter. Not sure mystery/thriller books are technically lighter, but they are quick reads and I don’t have to focus as much on them. This one has been on my TBR for awhile, although I knew nothing about it. I have to say this one was just okay for me. The story was interesting, but the character motivations just made no sense.

From Goodreads: Twenty-six years ago Hannah had her eye shot out. Now she wants justice. But is she blind to the truth? (insert groan here…what a terrible joke)

Christopher J. Yates’s cult hit Black Chalk introduced that rare writerly talent: a literary writer who could write a plot with the intricacy of a brilliant mental puzzle, and with characters so absorbing that readers are immediately gripped. Yates’s new book does not disappoint. Grist Mill Road is a dark, twisted, and expertly plotted Rashomon-style tale. The year is 1982; the setting, an Edenic hamlet some ninety miles north of New York City. There, among the craggy rock cliffs and glacial ponds of timeworn mountains, three friends—Patrick, Matthew, and Hannah—are bound together by a terrible and seemingly senseless crime. Twenty-six years later, in New York City, living lives their younger selves never could have predicted, the three meet again—with even more devastating results. 

The narrative is in both past and present, which was fine, but also from multiple perspectives, and this just didn’t work for me. Normally, I have no problem with multiple narrators, but this one just didn’t quite fit together. Maybe because the motivations for their actions were just really lame. The reason Hannah’s eye gets shot out….ridiculous. Equally ridiculous are Matthew and Patrick’s modern day motivations. I just was hoping for more with this one. Bummer.