The Books That….

Micro reviews from September:

The Book That Got Away:

Blood Over Bright Haven by M L Wang. This book has been on my TBR for a while, and I’ve actually had it in my hands twice. The first time, it was the self pub trade paperback and… the print was too tiny to suit me. The second time, I got my hands on the hardback from the publishers and… I just ran out of time to finish it before the library wanted it back. The third time may be the charm. I do like Sciona and Thomil (what I’ve seen of them so far), and of course, I appreciate the story of a woman struggling to make her mark in male-dominated academia.

The Book That I Loved:

The Tomb of Dragons by Katherine Addison. So, yeah, this is the hold book that came in while I was supposed to be reading Blood Over Bright Haven, and well, I just adore this series so, Bright Haven got shunted aside. Addison is just such a meticulous writer and things always feel so… sensible. This is my kind of “cozy” fantasy, one wrapped around a series of murders, politics, and at the core, a weird sort of celebration about just being a good, upright person who tries their best. Loved it.

The Books That I Want to Add to My Shelves:

Charlotte Vassell’s Caius Beauchamp mysteries: The Other Half & The In Crowd. I am getting so picky! To be fair, I have been reading obsessively for several decades now. I am allowed to be picky. I am so out of shelf space that it is absurd; I have stopped buying books in general (so, you know, only a dozen or so a year). But I really love this series and want to be able to reread them on a whim.

The characters are appealing, but primarily it’s about Vassell’s narrative voice. She’s wry, often scathing, but just as likely to turn that judgment back in on itself. Her characters might look at some trendy café and be snobbish about it, then just as quickly acknowledge that yeah, their mum might love it, and they’ll take her for a treat. And the plots are solid! All around pleasures to read.

The Book That I Noped Out of.

All The White Spaces – Ally Wilkes

I DNF a lot of books and many times there’s nothing objectively wrong with them. Sometimes they’re just hitting me in the wrong mood. Sometimes they’re just too familiar (decades of reading!) Sometimes, I just don’t click with the author. Here, it was primarily that I had recently read Dark Matter by Michelle Paver, and while they are two separate books, they have enough in common that I just didn’t want to finish this one.

The Book(s) That I am Eagerly Anticipating:

Okay, so everyone knows I am a Martha Wells fan. Obviously, I am lined up and ready with cash in hand for Queen Demon! Witch King wasn’t my favorite book of hers, but I did find the world fascinating. I can’t wait to see how she expands on it.

Also of note, T. Kingfisher’s What Stalks the Deep. Another Sworn Soldier novella? Hell, yeah!

Micro-Review: We Live Here Now

This has been the year of horror reads for me. Mostly, it has been very rewarding.

I just finished We Live Here Now by Sarah Pinborough, picked up on a whim, and really found it very satisfying. It’s also proof of how important an author’s voice is to my reading enjoyment.

We Live Here Now involves a super familiar premise: a couple—married or otherwise—full of issues and secrets moves into a house that is less a “fresh start” and more a fresh new hell. I routinely have tossed books like this against the (metaphorical) wall. (I rarely throw books, especially if they’re on my kindle!) I saw War of the Roses at an impressionable age and what it impressed upon me is how much I disliked watching a couple tear each other apart. How little tolerance I have for truly mean-spirited people. It’s especially irritating to me in a modern setting where it becomes increasingly difficult (plausibility wise) to keep a couple together. In the age of “setting healthy boundaries”, it’s hard to imagine couples staying together when they have come to actively dislike each other.

So, I started this book expecting that I would DNF it. But! I loved it.

And that is all due to Pinborough’s voice. She glides through this story. Just when the characters do something appalling, she’s there to remind you, it’s not just them—it’s the house encouraging this behavior—and the characters spend as much time regretting their behavior as they do committing the acts. It makes it so easy to just keep moving through the story.

Minor spoilers follow:

It’s told in three POVs. Emily’s, Freddie’s, and weirdly enough, a crow. The crow’s POV was unusual, but not off-putting. Another major point in Pinborough’s favor, because I often dislike animal POVs.

It’s got all the usual spooky accoutrements you want in a haunted house story—creaking doors, scratching noises, ominous messages, a country vicar, a few eerie rumors, windows that open and close, a terrible stench, a room that feels dangerously unwelcoming. And honestly, the usual plus the couple plus her strong writing would be enough, but then she adds the twist (which I will not discuss other than to say I very much enjoyed this element) which changes the whole feel of the story. It’s not just a haunted house story. It’s something weirder and better and just sold me on the whole thing. It went from a novel I enjoyed to a novel I want to make sure other people read. 

I think though, if it hadn’t been Pinborough writing it, I might have DNFed before the twist, and I would have missed out.

It seems like every holiday gets pushed on us earlier and earlier and you know, in the case of Halloween, I’m not mad about it. Spooky Season used to be Oct 1, but now apparently it’s Sep 1 and hey, I’ve started it off well with We Live Here Now.

My life by book numbers

It’s weird, but I tend to use my reading habits as a barometer of the state of me. Everything going great? I am reading no more than two books.

Stressed out of my gourd? Insomnia? I go through kindle unlimited books like potato chips–devouring entire series in a matter of days (Lots of time to read if you cut out sleep, I’m just saying.)

ADHD out of whack? Add another book to the pile. The breakfast book stays at the table. The lunch book stays on the e-reader. I add one book that was too tempting not to start, but then gets carted from room to room, temporarily lost over and over again.

No books? Send me to the doctor. Or more practically and a bit cheaper, send me to the bookstore. I’ll reset. It’ll be fine.

Writing up a storm and using my creative brain non-stop? I’ll be rereading all my favorite comfort reads. Ilona Andrews, Martha Wells, Agatha Christie. If I’m utterly wiped out? Dick Francis or Diana Wynne Jones.

If my life is chaos? Well, I can tell by so many obvious things, but the one that usually makes me sit up and say, okay, time to get things back under control is the number of books I am currently reading. I tend to read two books at a time. One is the breakfast table book; one is the lunchtime e-reader book.

Right now? I am reading a breakfast book (Cascade Failure, LM Sagas, very enjoyable); a lunchtime libby book (A Study in Drowning, Ava Reid; fraught but good); a dinnertime book (same table, different book, The Book That Wouldn’t Burn, Mark Lawrence–great characters so far); a bedtime book (How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying, Django Wexler–more violent than I was expecting somehow); an ‘oops, I left the bedtime book in another room so I’d better start a different book rather than walk down the stairs‘ book–(if you have an entourage of pets, you know why – Cinderwich, Cherie Priest, enjoyable if spare); the ‘I keep waking up in the middle of the night and the kindle is in bed with me*’ book (Hell for Hire, Rachel Aaron, popcorn book!), or the ‘ugh, I woke up in the middle of the night and the kindle is out of battery so I will use my phone kindle app‘ book (An Inheritance of Ashes, Leah Bobet; good but fraught), plus the two books that I have (kind of) forgotten that I am reading (Hide, Tracy Clark and The Monstrous Misses Mai, Van Hoang).

This is TOO MANY BOOKS. Plus I have two more library books eyeing me distrustfully. They want my full attention and don’t they understand that I just want to pick them up and love their first chapters or two? (Ghost Station, SA Barnes and How to Solve Your Own Murder, Kristen Perrin)…. I fully expect to start them before the end of the day in the name of ‘trying to figure out which one I should read next..’.

Anyway, this means that my solution to a life in CHAOS weirdly starts with… finishing a book. Sure, I’ll get the bills paid at some point, the laundry done before Monday, the house cleaning caught up on, the dogs groomed, etc., but for sheer sense of accomplishment? Getting the currently reading books down to two is the goal.

It gets to the point where I find myself wishing that I had picked worse, less enjoyable books, because then I could just declare them DNF (which totally counts as finishing a book somehow).

It’s okay. That’s what weekends are for, right? To catch up on reading short stories!!! (I know, I’m cuckoo for cocoa puffs, but I am so easily led into reading things and Alex Brown from Reactormag just listed their must read May stories)

That said, here are three book recommendations that I did finish this past week.

Alice Bell’s Grave Expectations. Fun, cozy sort of murder mystery with a ghost and an amateur detective whose life makes mine look neat, tidy, and organized. Claire and her ghostly best friend Sophie are hired to do a seance for an upper class family that is full of delightfully awful people. They uncover a past murder. Claire is kind of a disaster area as a person and I appreciate chaos in a protagonist. I really hope this is the start of a series. The characters are all engaging, and I’d like to hear more about them.

Killing Me by Michelle Gagnon. I picked this book up because well, kind of a long story. A few years ago, I was taking French and decided I would enjoy French lessons more if I could reward myself by reading in French and I found a novel that sounded really good and I thought this was the same author. It is not. I can’t recall the title (or apparently the author of the book I did want to read which is a pity because it still sounds intriguing in my memory) but this book sounded interesting in its own right.

If Grave Expectations is a cozy, Killing Me is a strange in-between step between a cozy and a genuine thriller. The tone is not always quite successful, and there are a few moments that misfired, but overall, I really enjoyed this. Even with chaos brain, I sat down and read this pretty much straight through. It’s about Amber (not her real name) young woman who is nearly killed by a serial killer, then rescued (accidentally) by a woman who is looking for a specific serial killer and is rather put out that she has stumbled on the wrong one. Since Amber has a past of her own to hide, she dodges the police and ends up in Vegas where she reunites with the hunter and a motley cast. The heroine is full of snark, which mostly works. It’s very readable.

The Brides of High Hill – Nghi Vo. I’ve read some of her other novellas in this series, but this is definitely one of my favorites. It’s a Bluebeard tale that gets upended in a sudden, yet delightfully vicious way. I loved it so much! Nghi Vo has become one of my favorite writers for interesting and beautifully written stories. I adored her clever take on The Great Gatsby: The Chosen and the Beautiful, and I also really loved Siren Queen.

*Yes, the kindle lives in the bed, why, where is it supposed to live? Somewhere out of reach?? Don’t be silly.

April reads

Apparently April is the month where I catch up on horror. It’s such a weird genre for me. I am fascinated by horror but also easily annoyed by it. I dislike people being cruel to each other for no reason. I dislike people suffering for no reason. And I really dislike nihilistic downer endings. It’s one of the things that turned me off of Supernatural—Sam and Dean had made everywhere hostile to them, so much so that even death wouldn’t be a rest (Yes, I know the series resolved well. I just gave up for a long time around season 10.)

But I also love people struggling against forces that they don’t understand. I love people trying to survive long odds—not undamaged, but coming out alive. I love man vs. monsters. I also really love the style. A lot of horror writing is extremely visceral (no pun intended) and powerful. It’s a genre of senses. The creeping cold around your ankles, that scratching of claws against your window, the scent of something subtly wrong, and on and on and on. Love that. It’s probably the most sense-driven genre.

So this month I read:

What Feasts at Night – T. Kingfisher

In this novella, a soldier decides to take a sojourn at their cabin in the woods, mostly to facilitate their batman’s affair with a mycologist. Of course, nothing is ever that easy. Easton arrives to find the caretaker dead and something lurking in the woods. I really adored What Moves the Dead, the first novella in this (hopefully long-running) Sworn Soldier series. I adored it, even though it used the Fall of the House of Usher as its springboard. I have contradictory opinions about books based on other fiction—suffice it to say that I approach all books of that ilk with suspicion.

What Feasts at Night was not quite as good as the first novella but was still an excellent read and a keeper. Kingfisher is really wonderful with setting and characterization. I always feel like I am immersed in her world, and I would love to hang out with her characters. I’m adding this series to my shelf with Sarah Monette’s Grave Key.

What Grows in the Dark – Jaq Evans

This is a tricky book. It has a heroine who is not particularly likeable, being repressed, and a con artist of sorts. She claims to be a psychic so that she and Ian, a college friend (who doesn’t really know her that well) can travel around making a little bit of money making youtube videos. She gets called back to her small town by her dead sister’s girlfriend who says something is taking other kids. The way it took her sister. Usually, I dislike characters who aren’t forthcoming with their friends and allow situations to go from bad to worse, but here, it works. This book never really gets terrifying, but it is definitely slow burn creepy.

A Cosmology of Monsters – Shaun Hamill

Strange, strange book. I loved it. It’s a literary sort of horror, about a family over decades, primarily the youngest son. And of course, it’s about the monsters that are haunting them. I really liked the monsters and their relationship to humans.

Where He Can’t Find You – Darcy Coates

A YA horror novel.

This one might be my favorite read of the month, not just of the horror books I read. I adored this book from page 1 to the end. It’s got a fairly standard premise: there’s a killer in a small town, and if you’re not careful, it’ll get you! But what really made this stand out is that everyone knows what’s up from page 1. The Stitcher is the town bogeyman; the teens think they know who he is, and the police agree, but! There’s no evidence. There’s none of that slow “we must convince people we’re right!” They start off believing two things at once: that the creepy man who smiles is the Stitcher, and that the Stitcher’s kills come on a crest of inexplicable events—technology failing, animals being born deformed, etc. I’m not a huge Darcy Coates fan; her books are hit or miss for me, but this one is a definite hit.

The Grip of It – Jac Jemc

This piece is as hard to follow in some ways as a fever dream, and that’s really what this book is like. Nightmarish. But you’re in it, and you’re accepting it, and then you wake up. The premise is a straight-forward as these stories go: a married couple with some problems buy a haunted house. Things get worse. This is definitely a book where the style is what sells it. If you want your hauntings wrapped up with a bow, though, this is not the book for you.

I also watched The Dead Boy Detectives, which I mostly liked.

All of these books were good reads.

Quick Book Rec

I don’t remember when I first heard about Calamity by Constance Fay, but it must have struck me favorably because when the book showed up as available on kindle unlimited, I snatched it up.

It is really a very good space opera romance. There are a lot of terrible ones out there, but this one had good characters, a continuously changing plot, and a romance that I enjoyed. The heroine and her love interest were suspicious of each other, but not to the point of stupidity or of self-sabotage or of pace-killing. The world-building was interesting enough that I want to know more about the ruling families, but also the other groups mentioned–the strange cults, the “little” people trying to make a life in the shadows of the families. Fay created a lot of types of sf technology, then used it in smart, entertaining ways.

Basically, I devoured this. It is full of the good tropes; the kind that you see coming and you smile in anticipation. Calamity got five stars for fun.

An equivalent would be the Kinsmen series by Ilona Andrews so if you liked that series, you will probably enjoy this. I know I did.

Recent Reads

Around this time of year, I start looking for spooky reads. This is always a little weird for me, because I’m both fascinated by horror novels and easily put off by them. Plus they sit outside my usual ranking system, because for me, a book has to be re-readable to get a four star or above–and I rarely want to reread horror novels. I’m just happy to survive them. So their ratings tend to be one of three. DNF–not for me! 3 stars–a good read that I will never revisit. Or the rare 5 stars, where I will never reread it myself, but I will tell everyone I know who likes horror that they have to read this book.

But I keep trying, even as I DNF the majority of them. I have such a narrow range of “horror that I enjoy” instead of “horror that annoys me” or “horror that horrifies me”. For the long weekend, I dove into two and they were both successes.

Malice House by Megan Shepherd has the kind of premise I just love. A character inheriting an isolated artist’s estate–along with its Terrible Secrets (TM). This book upped the ante by involving monsters. Plus it brought in the always evocative idea of art (writing or illustration) birthing its own reality. That said, this was a reasonably pleasant read, but not much more. There was a sudden jump to “The Marburys are cursed!” that sort of came out of nowhere for me. The ending was very full of all the monsters, when the rest of the book was only sort of looking at them sidelong. Plus Haven Marbury, the heroine, takes a midpoint action that feels also out of the blue. Overall, I liked the book, but it felt like Shepherd was putting in as many elements as she could to make sure her book felt distinct from others, and it just ended up a little rushed and muddled. The core tension between Haven Marbury and the local “Ink Drinkers” book club was wonderful, and went to great, creepy places. I also really loved Haven and Kylie’s friendship. An enjoyable read. It is apparently book one in a series, and I’ll probably read the next.

Burn the Negative by Josh Winning. Another familiar sort of premise that always attracts me: A cursed film, a child actor who’s made a new life for herself yet gets dragged back to the traumatic events of her past when the cursed film gets a remake. I liked this one a lot. It’s also sort of familiar, but it also has an interesting take on the “final girl”. A few twists that hold up well with the characterization and the information that has come before–which is not always the case! This one I recommend.

I’ll take suggestions for other horror reads. I like horror-adventure really. I don’t like horror where absolutely everyone dies miserably. I don’t like weirdly contrived stories. I like ghost stories. I love mad science. I love discovery stories. In movie terms, I like Crimson Peak, The Others, or The Relic. I don’t like Saw, Human Centipede, Hostel, or Seven.

Horror novels that have really worked for me? Gemma Files’ Experimental Film. Robert Jackson Bennett’s America Elsewhere. Kate Alice Marshall’s Rules for Vanishing. Stephen Graham Jones’ My Heart Is a Chainsaw. T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead. Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall.

More January Recommendations

January 2021’s being nice to me or I’ve just hit a lucky streak with enjoyable books. Last time, I talked about two good books; this week I’m going to talk about two even better good books.

So, Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Naturally. I was a fan of her writing in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, so of course I perked up when I heard she (finally) had a new book coming out. Then I heard the premise: strange amnesiac caught in a house/world/labyrinth and thought eh, maybe not. But I checked it out of the library (LOVE THE LIBRARY!) and started it with some trepidation, expecting to find the narrative voice of Piranesi hard-going.

It’s not. There’s a gazillion capitalized Nouns for Reasons, and tons of seemingly random fantasy descriptions, sure, but I just sort of fell into it. Piranesi’s voice is enjoyable because he’s just so good-hearted, so willing to find the good in the world of the House full of ocean. By the time it becomes clear that this is a book about academicians run amok (love those! Ever since Tartt’s The Secret History.) I was really hooked. I read this straight through.

What I really loved about it is the strange kindness of this book. The theme of being an appreciative part of the world around you. To say more would be moving into serious spoiler territory so I’m stopping here. But it was a delight to read. And it made me revisit Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etchings of ruined cities again. Beautiful art, which inspired a beautiful book.

My second “excellent” read of the week is all about the execution of the idea. Kate Alice Marshall’s YA novel Rules for Vanishing, has a premise that seems appropriate to any teen scream movie–a lost girl on a ghost road that only appears on certain nights at certain times, and is only traversable if you follow the rules. And even then, there are snares. It’s told as a series of transcripts, journal entries, texts, etc. Again, I can’t talk too much about it without spoilers, but Marshall has just constructed a really well-made horror novel (with a hopeful ending! thank you!).

Lots of nightmarish horror imagery but nothing that really squicked me. The characters are archetypes but still engaging, and the horrific core of the ghost road was really satisfying here. I am looking forward to her next release Our Last Echoes.

As a side note, I am apparently really slow when it comes to certain types of visuals–the face/vase illusion gets me all the time. And it took someone pointing it out to me that the cover of Rules for Vanishing had that type of illusion. Either a road surrounded by trees, or a girl’s figure in the trees. Yeah. Good job cover artist! Sorry it took me so long to appreciate it!

Girl?/Road? Can't be both;brain does not compute — Girl?/Road? Can’t be both;brain does not compute

Both Piranesi and Rules for Vanishing came from my local library, but I’m going to buy copies to add to my already groaning shelves.

Recently read, plus library book haul

Of late, my library hauls have been far more aspirational than actually readable, and that gets depressing, returning books without actually having had time to read them. So for the last haul, I allowed myself only three books, and determined to read them all. No matter what.*

(*Of course if I’d hated a book or just found it subpar for some reason, I wasn’t going to force myself, because better things to do!)

In the end, I read all three and enjoyed each of them in their own way.

I read Deanna Raybourn’s A Dangerous Collaboration, book 4 in the Veronica Speedwell mysteries. The previous three have been fun, but every single time I kept thinking, this reminds me so much of Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody series. Book 4 of the Veronica Speedwell books broke that curse and I enjoyed it without once thinking wistfully of Elizabeth Peters. Veronica is a nearly impossible iconoclast in the Victorian Era, but Raybourn gets away with it because a) Veronica is so appealing and b) because she’s careful to show that other Victorian women have their own vibrant internal lives. Veronica is just overt about hers. And (small spoiler!) finally Veronica and Stoker get their relationship figured out.

I read Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching, which has been recommended to me for years. And for years, I’ve side-eyed those who recommended it, thinking “really? I read it and it was AWFUL.” Oops. My bad. I had never read it. I read a book with a similar title (which was in fact awful). Once I realized my mistake, I sought out the actual book people were recommending. Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching is really enjoyable. In broad strokes, it’s sort of a haunted house story? But really, it’s a beautifully written and fascinating character study with a quiet, horror setting. TW: for eating disorders for anyone who wants to check it out. I will recommend it to readers in turn.

The final book I read was Jennifer Hillier’s The Butcher, a crime thriller with a gloss of horror. It’s not the best thing I’ve read in this genre by a long shot, but it was interesting enough that I’ll check out some of her other books. The characters are good though. The villain is suitably villainous and brazen. The heroine is suitably heroic. The greyscale boyfriend is… interesting. I liked that he wasn’t all good or bad. It’s definitely not a whodunit, because half the characters know who the villain is in the first chapter or so. (And the reader knows from the blurb!) So most of the tension is spent in wondering if the heroine will figure it out before she gets killed. Readable, at any rate.

Since that was successful, I decided to keep the next library haul small as well.

I picked up The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling which I want to read and am also kind of afraid to read. Caving. Not my thing. But space caving with horror? Maybe? The joy of the library. I can find out.

Liar’s Paradox by Taylor Stevens. Picked up on a whim. No clue whether I’ll like it or not. Again, yay for the library which lets me take these gambles.

Teeth in the Mist by Dawn Kurtagich. A YA horror novel in three time periods. I read Kurtagich’s Dead House and found it interesting enough that her name stuck with me, so I picked this up.

The final book is a cheat. I OWN this book, yet I checked it out from the library anyway. Because I haven’t finished it yet, and sometimes ebooks are just not satisfying. I don’t know. Some books want to be read on paper. Melissa Caruso’s The Tethered Mage is one of them. I actually checked this out once before, got five chapters in, went online and bought an e-copy. Then failed to keep reading it. IDEK. And now it’s buried under the pile of other ebooks. So, I figured maybe getting the actual book back in my hands will get me to finish it. I really loved what I read of it.

Reading Roundup

So last week or so I brought home the library haul. Five books, three of which I read completely, one of which I got 2/3rds through, and one that went back without really getting started. Then I hit the Raven Bookstore with a holiday giftcard for more bookloot. These are the results.

The Guilty Dead: Monkeewrench #9 Not a surprise that I really enjoyed The Guilty Dead, the ninth Monkeewrench outing. I skipped book 8 somehow, but each of these novels is pretty much standalone. One of the things I most like about this series is that even as the mysteries build to super high stakes, each step feels plausible. The characters are believable in their context. My favorite of the series is still probably The Sixth Idea, but this is a good entry. I understand that PJ Tracy is a solo act now after the death of her mother, but she’s doing her mom proud. Recommended for mystery lovers.

Creatures of Want and Ruin

I went back and forth on whether I was enjoying Creatures of Want & Ruin, by Molly Tanzer and in the end, the exceptional and out of the ordinary, characterization, demonology, and setting made this a win. Her books aren’t always paced the way I’d like, but they always make me feel rewarded for reading them. I’m looking forward to more in this world. Recommended.

Pop the Clutch! This is an anthology I picked up on a whim, despite not having any particular Pop the Clutch: Thrilling Tales of Rockabilly, Monsters, and Hot Rod Horror interest in Rockabilly culture. And the book had some formatting/editing issues that really irked me–splash pages of art left blank with <IMAGE PENDING> left behind; stories that repeated a sentence twice, the constant misspelling of “altar”. But crankiness aside, there were some gems of stories in here. I really enjoyed “Tremble” by Kasey and Joe Lansdale about a singer with a grudge; “Dr. Morbismo’s InsaniTERRORium Horror Show” by Lisa Morton about schlock horror shows running into a real ghost; and “I Was a Teenage Shroom Fiend” by Brian Hodge which has them all beat for pleasantly weird.

Priest of Bones by Peter McLean. How many times am I going to check this book out before I Priest of Bones (War for the Rose Throne Book 1) finally finish it?!? At least one more. The deal is that somehow, despite McLean’s great writing, and treading the sweet spot between “gritty” and “nihilistic”, and me being invested in the characters, I just keep hitting a wall. This time, I got through the entire first act, much of the second, and well… I’m not as interested in the turn the book makes toward politics. Add in the fact that it’s not a stand-alone, and I lose momentum. I’m still going to recommend it though because it’s really well-written! And really compelling! And I’m going to check it out again. Recommended.

Kill the Queen by Jennifer Estep. A DNF. Really, more of a DNStart. I blame the blurb. It told Kill the Queen (A Crown of Shards Novel Book 1) me too much of the exciting event to happen, so that I started the book on a mental timer, waiting for the slaughter to begin. And instead, I got a slow build, where the heroine notes all these “odd” things going on in the palace, but doesn’t draw any conclusion–which annoyed me, because I already knew what the conclusion was: SLAUGHTER!!! I was impatient and not in the mood. I sent it back to the library. It looks like it might be a lot of fun for the right reader. That’s apparently not me.

Picked up two mysteries at the local bookstore, one of which I disliked immensely because I thought the heroine and her family were horrible stuck-up snobs. Her sister met her fiance… ON THE INTERNET!!!! The Horror!!! And it tried really hard for quirky cast of characters but mostly just felt crowded and full of people I would hate to be around. Not going to name it. But it was one of those cozies that require the mystery to stop while the “gimmick” is run through. In this case, every meal involved a long description of the cooking process. Which, really, was maybe my favorite part? But… if I want to read about cooking, there are other books with that as the actual focus.

The Secret, Book, & Scone Society by Ellery Adams on the other hand was pretty good. It’s a little artsy for my taste in some places–the four women sharing their “dreadful” secrets and handing out secret keys, and the like–but in the end, I really liked these characters and would gladly read another book in the series.

Though I never read A Gentleman’s Guide to Vice & Virtue, that didn’t stop me from picking up the second book in the series, The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats & Piracy. I felt comfortable The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy doing this since it revolved around a secondary character from the first book as this book’s protagonist. And I’m always up for reading about a determined girl trying to break down the rules of society that get in her way. Things I really appreciated about this book? Multiple female characters, all fighting for their futures in their own ways, and learning to respect each other’s choices. That’s before you get to having an Ace protagonist, which is always refreshing. My only hiccup was that I was reading along assuming this was pretty much basic historical YA and suddenly there were magical dragon scales. So that sort of took me aback. Not badly, just a bit of blinking and wondering how MacKenzi Lee managed to convince the publishers to go for that!

And a personal fail. I bought a book I already owned. God, I hate that. A lot. At least it was a good book! A Treacherous Curse, book 3 of the Veronica Speedwell mysteries by Deanna Raybourn. I would recommend this series for anyone who loved the Amelia Peabody books by Elizabeth Peters.