YOUTHJUICE rating: 3 stars ⭐⭐⭐. HEBE was supposed to give me the heebie-jeebies, but the novel stole its own thunder almost immediately. A slow horror buildup would have been ideal in the gothic horror novel youthjuice by E.K. Sathue (Penguin Random House, June 4, 2024). Sophia is the new Creative Director for HEBE, a cosmetics […]
A WELL-TRAINED WIFE review: four stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐. A WELL-TRAINED WIFE: MY ESCAPE FROM CHRISTIAN PATRIARCHY by Tia Levings (St. Martin’s Press/Macmillan, August 6, 2024) is a blunt and staggering account of a woman’s marriage, motherhood, escape, and recovery within the extreme (arguably now mainstream) religious right. You can call it dominionism, you can call it
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SANDWICH rating: 5 stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐. Don’t tug at my heartstrings, as a rule. It annoys me. I don’t like three-hanky, or even two-hanky reads. One hanky might be okay if there is also humor. SANDWICH by Catherine Newman (HarperCollins, June 18, 2024), is a dead-realistic novel about three generations of family vacationing at Cape Cod.
THE LAST MURDER AT THE END OF THE WORLD rating: 3 stars ⭐⭐⭐. Turton, tighten. My reading circle will be shocked at this rating. I might have given THE LAST MURDER AT THE END OF THE WORLD by Stuart Turton (Sourcebooks, May 21, 2024) four stars, if not for the horror western I read next,
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THE FOX WIFE rating: 5 stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐. The term “immersive” gets thrown around a lot, but I rarely get truly immersed in books. Yangsze Choo‘s fantasy novel THE FOX WIFE (Henry Holt/Macmillan, February 13, 2024) had me in its grip from page one. I was there in 1908 Manchuria. The novel is as stunning as
THE WARM HANDS OF GHOSTS rating: 5 stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐. I’ve been waiting for-ev-er. Eons. Okay, five years. But that’s a long time to wait for Katherine Arden. The Winternight Trilogy is one of my favorite fantasy trilogies, hands down. THE WARM HANDS OF GHOSTS by Katherine Arden (Del Rey/Penguin Random House, February 13, 2024) ends
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WHAT FEASTS AT NIGHT rating: 4 stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐. Chilling! It wasn’t real horses as I predicted from the cover, but dream horses that were scary in WHAT FEASTS AT NIGHT, the second novella in the Sworn Solider horror series by T. Kingfisher (Tor/Macmillan, February 13, 2024). However, distinguishing dreams from reality is iffy in this
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THE FAMILIAR rating: 5 stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐. Leigh Bardugo‘s historical fantasy novel THE FAMILIAR (Flatiron/Macmillan, April 9, 2024) is set around 1590 in Madrid, just after the defeat of the Spanish Armada by England under Elizabeth I, and a century after the first expulsion of the Jews from Spain in accordance with Ferdinand and Isabella’s Alhambra
THE WEREWOLF AT DUSK: AND OTHER STORIES rating: 4 stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐. (Every line of every illustration: five stars). David Small is a favorite illustrator of both me and my children, and STITCHES is my favorite graphic novel of all time and one of my favorite memoirs. This graphic novel story collection, THE WEREWOLF AT DUSK
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COLD COMFORT FARM rating: 5 stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐. Last night I dreamt I went to Cold Comfort again. I didn’t see anything nasty in the woodshed, but then I steered well clear of all outbuildings. COLD COMFORT FARM by Stella Gibbons (1932) is 91 years old and one of my favorites. I’ve read it many times.
