Tag: reading

Categories
books and reading

Bones to the Wind

Title: Bones to the Wind

Author: Tatiana Obey

Genre: YA fantasy

I had the honor of editing this book, but my opinions are entirely honest. I’m hit or miss with YA fantasy. Some of it is just too much for me. But this book was really great. Obey does an excellent job of world-building, which is really difficult to do. She places her characters in their universe while also leading the reader through the maze of a brand new setting. World-building is another layer of writing that many don’t even bother with. When a book is set in our world, there’s no building that needs to be done. Maybe this is why fantasy is so hard for me. Sometimes the worlds just make no sense at all. Thankfully, this isn’t the case here. I loved the world, the characters, and the plot.

From Goodreads: Rasia is determined to destroy her old man’s record in the Forging, a trial each child must succeed to come of age. All Rasia needs to do is hunt down a gonda, hitch its tentacle ass to her windship, and haul it back home in record time. Easy. Or it would be if Rasia wasn’t stuck on the same team as Nico—a know-it-all, spoiled, grubworm who never does anything Rasia tells her to do.

Nico doesn’t care about Rasia’s egotistical dreams of glory. This is her brother’s last chance to pass the Forging or her father is going to banish him from the family. She needs to scour the desert to find whatever team the bones placed him on and help him kill a gonda before it kills him.

Too bad Nico and Rasia can’t get along to steer a windship straight.

BONES TO THE WIND is a coming-of-age sword and sorcery fantasy adventure. Action-packed and humorous, the novel includes strong female characters, LGBTQIA+ representation, and mature themes.

What I really loved about this book is that there’s no actual antagonist. Society itself is definitely fighting against the characters, but Rasia and Nico are both heroic and a mess. Both have good and bad traits. And they are perfect foils for each other. It’s hard to pick which one you want to cheer for because they are both equally loveable and frustrating. I wanted to claim into the book and knock their heads together sometimes because they are so stubborn. When I’m this engaged in a book, I know it’s one that will stick with me. I can’t wait for the second installment to see where this world goes next. This book is available now on Amazon, so please support this young indie author.

Categories
books and reading

Pearl

Title: Pearl

Author: Josh Malerman

Genre: horror

Thank you NetGalley for this book!

My love for Josh Malerman has no boundaries. I’ve loved everything he’s written: Bird Box, Goblin, Malorie, Inspection, A House at the Bottom of the Lake, Unbury Carol, and Black Mad Wheel. And now Pearl, which is an absolutely delicious, demented, disturbing book. And I loved every minute of it. Telepathic pig. Sold.

From Goodreads: Go to the farm just outside of town and you’ll hear it. A voice. Inside your head. Or is it?

Come to me…

A voice that makes you want to pick up that axe over in the corner of the barn. And swing it. And kill.

Feed us. Feed us now.

It is the voice of Pearl.

Sing for me. Sing for your precious Pearl…

I mean, come on. A telepathic pig who wants you to kill? Genuis. And because Malerman is such a good writer, it’s not cheesy or poorly written. Pearl is horrifying. The pig is so creepy with his one bad eye and sitting like a human. The events are grotesque and bloody. The characters are torn down and put back together by Pearl. And when Pearl gets into your head, there’s no stopping him. This book was just so absurd and hilarious. And so much fun.

Categories
books and reading

The Lighthouse Witches

Title: The Lighthouse Witches

Author: CJ Cooke

Genre: supernatural mystery

Thank you to NetGalley for this book!

I’m not a big fan of witch stories, but this one sounded like a lot of fun. It’s told in both 1998 and 2021, which is a really difficult way to write a book because you can’t give too much away in either storyline because the other plot will be ruined, but Cooke does a great job balancing them. Overall, this book was really enjoyable and had a fun twist at the end.

From Goodreads: When single mother Liv is commissioned to paint a mural in a 100-year-old lighthouse on a remote Scottish island, it’s an opportunity to start over with her three daughters–Luna, Sapphire, and Clover. When two of her daughters go missing, she’s frantic. She learns that the cave beneath the lighthouse was once a prison for women accused of witchcraft. The locals warn her about wildlings, supernatural beings who mimic human children, created by witches for revenge. Liv is told wildlings are dangerous and must be killed.

Twenty-two years later, Luna has been searching for her missing sisters and mother. When she receives a call about her youngest sister, Clover, she’s initially ecstatic. Clover is the sister she remembers–except she’s still seven years old, the age she was when she vanished. Luna is worried Clover is a wildling. Luna has few memories of her time on the island, but she’ll have to return to find the truth of what happened to her family. But she doesn’t realize just how much the truth will change her.

While in the 2021 storyline, Luna will frequently think about the past, but it’s not always clear that is what’s happening. I was a bit confused at times and had to go back and reread. That might have been my fault, though, because I read quickly and easily could have missed the shifts. The wildling idea was nice and creepy, but the book isn’t really scary. This isn’t a complaint, but just to let people know what to expect. The twist at the end absolutely made sense, which is a must for me. I despise twists that exist just to throw the reader off. But this one was great. Overall, this book was a lot of fun and kept me reading and guessing.

Categories
books and reading

As the Wicked Watch

Title: As the Wicked Watch

Author: Tamron Hall

Genre: thriller

Thank you, NetGalley for this book!

I really wanted to love this book. I’m a big fan of Tamron Hall’s and want good things for her. But, I found this book uneven to the point of frustration. I’m bummed! I loved the main character and the fact that Hall was able to put her own journalistic background into the story. This aspect definitely worked well. But the actual plot just fell apart over the course of the book.

From Goodreads: When crime reporter Jordan Manning leaves her hometown in Texas to take a job at a television station in Chicago, she’s one step closer to her a dream: a coveted anchor chair on a national network.

Jordan is smart and aggressive, with unabashed star-power, and often the only woman of color in the newsroom. Her signature? Arriving first on the scene—in impractical designer stilettos. Armed with a master’s degree in forensic science and impeccable instincts, Jordan has thus far been able to balance her dueling motivations: breaking every big story—and giving voice to the voiceless.

From her time reporting in Texas, she’s sure she has covered the vilest of human behaviors, but nothing has prepared her for Chicago. You see, Jordan is that rare breed of journalist who can navigate a crime scene as well as she can a newsroom—often noticing what others tend to miss. Again and again, she is called to cover the murders of black females, many of them sexually assaulted, most brutalized, and all of them quickly forgotten.

All until Masey James—the story that Jordan just can’t shake, try as she might. A fifteen-year-old girl whose body was found in an abandoned lot, Masey has come to represent for Jordan all of the frustration that her job—with its required distance—often forces her to repress. Putting the rest of her workload and her (fraying) personal life aside, Jordan does everything she can to give the story the coverage it desperately requires, and that a missing black child would so rarely get. Three young boys are eventually charged with Masey’s murder, but Jordan remains unconvinced.

There’s a serial killer on the loose, Jordan believes, and he’s hiding in plain sight.

I liked the concept of the plot. A journalist takes a deep dive into a murder. Great. But this story had too many characters. Some of them could have been combined into one that had more purpose. I also felt like the pacing was off. If a book is going to be about a serial killer (not saying it is or not, but there are two deaths in the book) the second death shouldn’t be at 90% of the way through the book. The ending was completely rushed and jumped around a lot. I still think Hall is fantastic, but this book needed a good edit.

Categories
books and reading

The Best Short Stories 2021

Title: The Best Short Stories 2021

Editor: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Genre: short story collection

Thank you NetGalley for this book!

I don’t read a ton of story collections, but I’m always pleased after I finish one. I love discovering new authors whose story has stuck with me. And I think it’s so much more challenging to write a short story than a novel. You have so little space to make an impact on the reader. I broke this book up into chunks, reading one or two stories a day, and that method worked really well for me. Overall, I really enjoyed these stories.

From Goodreads: Twenty prizewinning stories selected from the thousands published in magazines over the previous year–continuing the O. Henry Prize’s century-long tradition of literary excellence.

Now entering its second century, the prestigious annual story anthology has a new title, a new look, and a new guest editor. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has brought her own refreshing perspective to the prize, selecting stories by an engaging mix of celebrated names and young emerging voices. The winning stories are accompanied by an introduction by Adichie, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines that publish short fiction.

Featured in this collection: Daphne Palasi Andreades – David Means- Sindya Bhanoo- Crystal Wilkinson- Alice Jolly- David Rabe- Karina Sainz Borgo (translator, Elizabeth Bryer) – Jamel Brinkley- Tessa Hadley – Adachioma Ezeano- Anthony Doerr- Tiphanie Yanique – Joan Silber – Jowhor Ile – Emma Cline – Asali Solomon – Ben Hinshaw – Caroline Albertine Minor (translator, Caroline Waight) – Jianan Qian – Sally Rooney

Several of these stories really stuck with me, particularly the ones from Daphne Palasi Andreades, Crystal Wilkinson, Jamal Brinkley, and Jianan Qian, all of who are new to me. I’ve never read any of their other works. But you really can’t go wrong with this collection. Each one has something that you’ll enjoy. I’m glad I picked this one up.

Categories
books and reading

Red Clocks

Title: Red Clocks

Author: Leni Zumas

Genre: dystopian

Finally, not a celebrity memoir! And this one was from my favorite genre- dystopia. And although I’ve read better ones, this one was really interesting. You follow five different women who all live in the same town in Oregon. They all live in a world where abortion is illegal, and the Personhood Amendment rules the land. Sound familiar?? Ugh. These women are tangentially related, which becomes more prevalent as the book progresses.

From Goodreads: Five women. One question. What is a woman for?

In this ferociously imaginative novel, abortion is once again illegal in America, in-vitro fertilization is banned, and the Personhood Amendment grants rights of life, liberty, and property to every embryo. In a small Oregon fishing town, five very different women navigate these new barriers alongside age-old questions surrounding motherhood, identity, and freedom.

Ro, a single high-school teacher, is trying to have a baby on her own, while also writing a biography of Eivør, a little-known 19th-century female polar explorer. Susan is a frustrated mother of two, trapped in a crumbling marriage. Mattie is the adopted daughter of doting parents and one of Ro’s best students, who finds herself pregnant with nowhere to turn. And Gin is the gifted, forest-dwelling homeopath, or “mender,” who brings all their fates together when she’s arrested and put on trial in a frenzied modern-day witch hunt.

I’m not sure how this book would be on audio because it has a stream-of-consciousness feel to it. The characters insert random internal thoughts into their conversations, which is easy to follow since they are italicized but in audio would be a nightmare. I really enjoyed this book, though. I loved seeing how the women all came together and helped each other out. The world they live in is terrifying but very real. There is no reason to think we aren’t headed on that same path.

Categories
books and reading

Born a Crime

Title: Born a Crime

Author: Trevor Noah

Genre: memoir

Since I’m the last person on the planet to read this much-hyped book, I figure that since I’m on a roll with celebrity memoirs, I might as well. I do wish I could have listened to it, but since I rarely do that, my standby ebook format would have to suffice. I know absolutely nothing about Trevor Noah, other than his job as the host of The Daily Show and the fact that he’s from South Africa. I’ve seen clips of TDS, and he’s really funny, but I don’t watch it. So learning about his childhood wasn’t something I sought out because I’m a fan of his. It’s just been recommended so many times by so many people that I thought, why not?

From Goodreads: Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle.

Born a Crime is the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist. It is also the story of that young man’s relationship with his fearless, rebellious, and fervently religious mother—his teammate, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life.

This book was great. Trevor Noah is known for his humor, which is evident throughout the entire story. I laughed a lot, but it’s also a really heartfelt read. He loves his mother dearly, even though she was hard on him. He understood that her stubbornness was always from a place of love. She tried to teach them the ways of the world and how life as a mixed boy (his words) in S. Africa was the hardest life imaginable. They were also very poor. Like eating caterpillar sandwiches poor. Even if you aren’t necessarily a fan of his, the book is funny and engaging. I really enjoyed it, and I have a new respect for Noah. He certainly worked hard to get where he is.

Categories
books and reading

Will

Title: Will

Author: Will Smith

Genre: memoir

And….yet another celebrity memoir. I promise that’s not all I’m going to read these days. Although, I’m reading another right now. Ack! I guess I’m saving up all the ones I would have read during the year for right now. I can’t say I learned a whole lot of “dirt” in this one, unlike the other two, but Will certainly thinks highly of himself, which is definitely earned. In the 2000s, he couldn’t be beaten at the box office. But as he’s grown older, he has learned to take a step back and look at what’s really important in life.

From Goodreads: One of the most dynamic and globally recognized entertainment forces of our time opens up fully about his life, in a brave and inspiring book that traces his learning curve to a place where outer success, inner happiness, and human connection are aligned. Along the way, Will tells the story in full of one of the most amazing rides through the worlds of music and film that anyone has ever had.

Will Smith’s transformation from a fearful child in a tense West Philadelphia home to one of the biggest rap stars of his era and then one of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood history, with a string of box office successes that will likely never be broken, is an epic tale of inner transformation and outer triumph, and Will tells it astonishingly well. But it’s only half the story.

Will Smith thought, with good reason, that he had won at life: not only was his own success unparalleled, his whole family was at the pinnacle of the entertainment world. Only they didn’t see it that way: they felt more like star performers in his circus, a seven-days-a-week job they hadn’t signed up for. It turned out Will Smith’s education wasn’t nearly over.

This memoir is the product of a profound journey of self-knowledge, a reckoning with all that your will can get you and all that it can leave behind. Written with the help of Mark Manson, author of the multi-million-copy bestseller The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Will is the story of how one person mastered his own emotions, written in a way that can help everyone else do the same. Few of us will know the pressure of performing on the world’s biggest stages for the highest of stakes, but we can all understand that the fuel that works for one stage of our journey might have to be changed if we want to make it all the way home. The combination of genuine wisdom of universal value and a life story that is preposterously entertaining, even astonishing, puts Will the book, like its author, in a category by itself.

When someone is young and makes it big, I think it’s often a rough go. Will’s parents were guiding forces in his life, but he still made poor decisions, ended up broke and lost, and had no idea what to do. Getting the Fresh Price tv show broke open his world, and he never looked back. But Will wasn’t just the greatest guy. He wasn’t a bad guy, but he never put others first. He was first. Always. His marriage suffered. His kids suffered. His own happiness always won. So, over the course of the book, his self-realization is really refreshing. He admits his mistakes and owns them. He explains who he is now and what outlook he has. I certainly recommend this for fans of his. You will see him in a new light.

Categories
books and reading

Exposure collection

Title/Author: Nightcrawlers/Rosecrans Baldwin, The Two Million Dollar Intern/David Gauvey Herbert, Bad Therapist/Evan Wright, Ms. Mirage/Joe Tone, King of Dreams/Christie Thompson, The Officer and the Entrepreneur/Dan Slater

Genre: Non-fiction

I just love these Amazon short stories. I have read Disorder collection, The One collection, Black Stars collection, Faraway Collection, Nameless, Foreward, Out of Line, and Hush. All have been outstanding. This collection was unlike the others. These stories were journalistic investigations. I could easily see each story as its own podcast. Each one, aside from Nightcrawlers, which is actually an uplifting story, tells the story of a person being exposed for being as bad as you think they are. From city corruption to misrepresentation to outright lies, these stories dig deep into the truth.

From Goodreads: Nightcrawlers: It’s a Darien, Connecticut, tradition: an emergency medical service managed by adolescents. One kid is a varsity soccer captain. There’s a future doctor, a band dork, a theater geek. Theirs is a view of town without the niceties. A drunken spouse turned violent. Lonely old people stuck in the bath. A midlife suicide. How do these kids process the sometimes shocking and violent life-and-death secrets of their community? The answer is a story of high stress and uncommon high school lives, told by a writer who spent his own youth on the night shift. Welcome to Post 53.

The Two Million Dollar Intern: A Ponzi scheme was exposed, and a prominent Manhattan hedge fund imploded. Enterprising intern and financial wizard-in-training Gerti Muho saw it as an opportunity. He had insider knowledge and a knack for fraud, embezzlement, and identity theft. His steady supply of speed helped. Muho was on a luxury high. His luck seemed bottomless. Considering what was to come, he’d need it.

Bad Therapist: Chris Bathum was a respected therapist, addiction specialist, and founder of one of the fastest-growing rehabilitation chains in America. But Bathum was a total fraud: he was a meth-head with a history of sexually abusing his patients, scamming insurance companies, and eliminating whistle-blowers. Like Rose Stahl. But this intended victim would be his last. Stahl would risk her life to bring down the monster she and so many other people in need had once trusted for their salvation.

Ms. Mirage: In the era of Watergate and rising feminist awareness, reporter Pam Zekman was queen of the muckrakers. Her biggest investigation: buy a bar, document the inevitable city department shakedowns and bribes, and publicly document Chicago’s institutionalized corruption. Her epic story changed Chicago and also raised serious questions about the future of journalism.

King of Dreams: Peter Candlewood understood the system. That’s how he could commute prison sentences and reunite hopeless families with incarcerated loved ones. For a price. Except there was no Candlewood. No hope. Just a lowly Texas con artist who bet on the desperate—and won. And he wasn’t working alone. The multimillion-dollar deception cost the betrayed more than their savings.

The Officer and the Entrepreneur: After Kevin Corley’s military career came to an ill-fated end, he answered another call of duty, unaware that he was walking into a ruse orchestrated by one of the government’s most enterprising agents. John Leonard was posing online as an underworld figure to entrap those who were predisposed to crime. When he lured Lieutenant Corley into his scheme, he didn’t know how wrong it would go. And Corley had no idea he had so much left to lose.

Nightcrawlers was really great and will give you hope. These teenagers who run Post are just outstanding people, and I really loved reading their stories. All the others are ones where the bad people definitely get outed, and you can’t wait for that to happen. Some of these are longer than a usual short story, more like a novella. But all were really interesting.

Categories
books and reading

Going There

Title: Going There

Author: Katie Couric

Genre: Memoir

I really don’t read celebrity memoirs, but here we are again. I am a Today Show junkie and have always loved Katie Couric, so when I saw she had written her story, I knew I would read it. And it was definitely worth it. She’s honest and genuine. She doesn’t hold back about a lot of topics including the misogyny in her field and the downfall of her dear friend, (no longer, though) Matt Lauer. She talks a lot about the death of her husband, the father of her children, Jay Monahan. And she reflects upon the good and bad of her career.

From Goodreads: For more than forty years, Katie Couric has been an iconic presence in the media world. In her brutally honest, hilarious, heartbreaking memoir, she reveals what was going on behind the scenes of her sometimes tumultuous personal and professional life – a story she’s never shared, until now. Of the medium she loves, the one that made her a household name, she says, “Television can put you in a box; the flat-screen can flatten. On TV, you are larger than life but smaller, too. It is not the whole story, and it is not the whole me. This book is.”

Beginning in early childhood, Couric was inspired by her journalist father to pursue the career he loved but couldn’t afford to stay in. Balancing her vivacious, outgoing personality with her desire to be taken seriously, she overcame every obstacle in her way: insecurity, an eating disorder, being typecast, sexism . . . challenges, and how she dealt with them, setting the tone for the rest of her career. Couric talks candidly about adjusting to sudden fame after her astonishing rise to co-anchor of the TODAY show, and guides us through the most momentous events and news stories of the era, to which she had a front-row seat:  Rodney King, Anita Hill, Columbine, the death of Princess Diana, 9/11, the Iraq War . . . In every instance, she relentlessly pursued the facts, ruffling more than a few feathers along the way.  She also recalls in vivid and sometimes lurid detail the intense pressure on female anchors to snag the latest “get”—often sensational tabloid stories like Jon Benet Ramsey, Tonya Harding, and OJ Simpson.

Couric’s position as one of the leading lights of her profession was shadowed by the shock and trauma of losing her husband to stage 4 colon cancer when he was just 42, leaving her a widow and single mom to two daughters, 6 and 2. The death of her sister Emily, just three years later, brought yet more trauma—and an unwavering commitment to cancer awareness and research, one of her proudest accomplishments.

 Couric is unsparing in the details of her historic move to the anchor chair at the CBS Evening News—a world rife with sexism and misogyny.  Her “welcome” was even more hostile at 60 Minutes, an unrepentant boys club that engaged in outright hazing of even the most established women.  In the wake of the MeToo movement, Couric shares her clear-eyed reckoning with gender inequality and predatory behavior in the workplace, and the downfall of Matt Lauer—a colleague she had trusted and respected for more than a decade.

Couric also talks about the challenge of finding love again, with all the hilarity, false starts, and drama that search entailed, before finding her midlife Mr. Right.  Something she has never discussed publicly—why her second marriage almost didn’t happen. 

If you thought you knew Katie Couric, think again. Going There is the fast-paced, emotional, riveting story of a thoroughly modern woman, whose journey took her from humble origins to superstardom. In these pages, you will find a friend, a confidante, a role model, a survivor whose lessons about life will enrich your own.

Katie is an excellent writer, and her humor comes through loud and clear in this book. She’s also very honest. I believe her when she said she had no idea what Lauer was doing behind the scenes. I also appreciated her ability to look at her past self and declare her questions “tone deaf” at times. We have learned a lot in the past twenty years about how to ask questions that are more sensitive to others, especially to people of color, where Couric admittedly failed many times. But those conversations are what we need. We need to be able to reflect upon the past and learn from our cringe-worthy mistakes. I learned a lot about Couric through this book, mostly that she is just another person. She loves her parents and family. She struggled to be a present mom while balancing her demanding career. And she explains how she faced the worst when dealing with her husband’s death. Anyone who is a fan of hers will love this book.