Book Review - Wayward

Wayward by Blake Crouch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

These books are just so much fun.

I marked this as currently reading a couple of days ago, but didn't start it until last night. And once again, after I had picked it up I was in it til the end, reading under the covers like I did as a ten-year-old and barely holding in my excitement during the climax of the book.

But this is very hard to review without barfing spoilers all over the place.

If you liked Pines, the first book in this trilogy, you'll like Wayward. If you like creepy, dark novels, you will love this. If you liked shows like Twin Peaks and the X files, or books like The Lottery (The Shirley Jackson one we all read in 8th grade, you know the one), then you will stay up late at night reading this book under the covers and gasping and squealing in all the right places.

It's just so much fun.

I thought I was burned out on dystopia when a recent read that was pretty well reviewed here and on Amazon just bored me and made me question my whole love of the genre. But I still love dystopia. I just love *good* dystopia. These characters are real and relatable and not all-powerful. They are human and flawed, even our hero isn't such an awesome guy. He's just an ordinary husband who makes mistakes and sometimes makes great triumphs.

The world-building here did have me question a couple of places. If they don't have furnaces, why do they have hot water heaters? If they have such limited stores, why are they using disposable styrofoam coffee cups? Things like that. They'd make me hesitate for a second, but not long enough to cost the book a star. If there had been much more of that, maybe. But I wasn't overly troubled.

As happens with the best dystopia, I wanted to be a part of everything. It drew me in that much. I'd probably die first, you know how that goes, but I wanted to be there to see it anyway.

View all my reviews

Book Review - Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things

Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by Randy O. Frost
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

First, let me explain that when I ordered this book from the library, I did so because we have a hoarder in our family that I was hoping to help, or at the very least, to understand better. By the time the book was shipped from another library and delivered into my hot little hands, that family member had been cut out of my life for other reasons.

I figured I would read the book anyway, since I enjoy hoarding TV shows in a rubbernecking-at-the-accident way, and thought this might be entertaining as well.

Yeah.... not so much.

This is sort of a memoir of a person who has both treated and studied hoarders for years. It includes stories of the people in his case studies, but it's much more sad and depressing than it is entertainment. Enlightening? Sure. But in a way that made both my heart and my head hurt.

This is less about horror stories and more about the significant mental illnesses that plague people who also suffer from hoarding disorders. It is academic, a bit dry in places, and a bit draggy in places. If you are interested in the psychological study of hoarding disorders, this is for you. If you are interested in different treatment approaches and how they fared among different patients, this is for you. If you are prepared for sad endings, stories of depressing childhoods, tales of abuse and neglect and marriages pulled apart, give this a go.

If you are looking for a fun horror story, a'la "Hoarding: Buried Alive" or "Hoarders" this is not the book you are looking for.

View all my reviews

Book Review - The Eleventh Plague

The Eleventh Plague by Jeff Hirsch
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Maybe I'm just getting tired of reading so much apocalyptic and dystopian YA, but this one just didn't really do much for me. The best part was that the characters were well-developed and sympathetic. The worst was that they stretched my suspension of disbelief somewhat when a kid with no actual battle experience came up with the plan that saved the day and the whole town.

Yeah, okay.

By then I was pretty well committed to the book, and pushed through to the end, but I think it would have been a better read without the draggy epilogue. At that point I just kept wishing it was over.

I get that kids in YA books - particularly teens - are expected to be intelligent, efficient problem-solvers. I get that they are also supposed to be realistic teens. This book pushed a bit oddly on both those accounts. Either you are so shy and nervous you're afraid to play baseball, or you're so brave that you'll run straight into gunfire. I mean really? Just couldn't wrap my head around some of it. Bah. Maybe I'm turning into a grumpy old lady reader.

View all my reviews

Book Review - Pines

Pines by Blake Crouch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What a fun, fast read. I couldn't put this down - it's weird and fascinating and intriguing and mysterious and kept me reading til 1 am when I finally finished it. Now I can't wait to start number two in the trilogy, and am already requesting book three from the library!

Special Agent Ethan Burke has been sent to Wayward Pines to discover what happened to two other Secret Service agents, who disappeared while on an investigation in the small, seemingly idyllic town. What he finds seems to defy expectation, and it looks like he is going to be the next agent who never gets to leave.

This book is creepy. Very creepy. It is also reminiscent of Twin Peaks, which the author acknowledges was an inspiration for his work. It's fun, and definitely an entertaining read.

View all my reviews

Book Review - Fledgling

Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've debated a bit on the rating of this particular book... more than I normally would. While I really enjoyed the writing, the style was clean and concise and the characters were interesting and relatable, and while I found the plot engaging, I just couldn't get past a certain squick over the idea of a character in the body of a ten year old having sex with adults.

But that's the creep factor inherent in a vampire book where someone who is 53 years old might inhabit the body of a ten year old. And it really got to me, here and there. I pushed through because I found the rest of the book so, so good, but oh god those parts really, really bothered me. Bothered me so much that at one point I felt so icky I had to go take a shower. I skipped later instances of it.

The tale begins with a young woman awakening with terrible injuries in the woods,and evolves into her own search to discover not only what happened to her, but who she is and where she comes from, as a traumatic head injury has left her with severe amnesia. The plot pays off - it's a cool mystery. But the sex? Ewwwwww.

View all my reviews

Book Review - The Scent of Rain and Lightning

The Scent of Rain and Lightning by Nancy Pickard
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I feel like this book deserved for me to like it a little bit more than this, but I just didn't.

The beginning of the book - and sporadically throughout - is overwritten. There is a lot of telling, rather than showing, and over-description that I found tedious. Now, I don't expect everyone to write like Hemmingway, certainly, as that's boring too, but there's a lot to be said for trimming some adjectives.

This novel follows a 20-year-old mystery. Who killed the parents of the little girl who became the center of a small town? Was it the man who has been whiling away his days in prison after enough other dastardly deeds that he deserved to be there anyway? Was it one of the members of the stalwart rich-rancher-family that the husband of the couple hailed from? Or someone else in close knit small town? Jody is determined to find out what happened, in particular, to her mother, whose body was never found and that need to know is jump-started by the man convicted of the crime returning to their small town after he is released due to issues with the trial.

The mystery itself is pretty solid and compelling. The characters, while sometimes suffering from stereotyping, are interesting and sympathetic enough. The setting is okay; Kansas flatland has never been a go-to type of setting for me, but alright. The writing is ok. And so, three stars seems just about fitting when I consider that I thought everything about the novel was pretty middle of the road. It's not bad. It's just not spectacular. I wouldn't seek out more books by the author.

View all my reviews

Book Review - Stumbling on Happiness

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Everyone out there is seeking happiness. How do you find it? At the bottom of a self-help book? After decades of talk therapy to work out all your demons? Just by choosing happiness every day? There are so many theories out there about how we can achieve joy in our lives.

This book is not about that. This book is not a road map to finding happiness. It's about why we don't get there. It's about why we make the same mistakes over and over again that make us miserable. It's about how our brain tricks us into feeling emotions, and how we often aren't really sure how we are going to feel or how we did feel, even if we usually can iterate how we feel in the current moment.

It's about why everyone is so bad at finding happy, even if they spend their whole lives chasing it. And if you take all that to heart, you might be able to actually figure out how to get some happiness for yourself. There are an awful lot of psychological studies cited in this book, but the author does a good job of categorizing them and drawing overall conclusions from the varied results achieved over time in the area of happiness searching. I enjoyed the conversational writing style that turned what might be dry statistics in another style of presentation into humorous, interesting, thought-provoking information.

While I really enjoyed this book overall, I did find some sections slightly repetitive (this might be helpful for less careful readers but was annoying for me) and others a little draggy. I found it very helpful, though, and it inspired some really long, interesting discussions with my husband about our thoughts on happiness.

While I maintain my own theories about choosing happiness - and would call the "happiness" in the book more of a contentment or satisfaction with life - I think learning more about how the gray matter that rules my world works is always worthwhile.

View all my reviews

Book Review - Fracture

Fracture by Megan Miranda
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What makes you human? What makes you, more than anything else, alive? Are you just a collection of neurons firing in the grey matter in your skull, or is it more than that?

Delaney sure hopes it is more than that, because after spending 11 minutes under the ice of a frozen lake, after spending 11 minutes dead, her brain doesn't fire the way it's supposed to. She should be in a vegetative state, but she's not. She should be dead, but she's not. With that said, is she really alive?

This was an interesting and very fast read. I liked the characters well enough, though from time to time was frustrated by the short-sightedness that stems from them being teenagers. I'm always aware that something along those lines is going to annoy me when I read a YA novel, but it never stops me from getting annoyed when it happens.

There was a fun little bonus in the back of the book - a chapter retold from the perspective of a different character. It was insightful and I really enjoyed it.

View all my reviews

Book Review - Stay Awake

Stay Awake by Dan Chaon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Recently my friends told me I should be reading happy books right now. This is definitely not a happy book, but it made me feel better anyway.

This is a sad, creepy, sometimes scary, sometimes makes your skin crawl, sometimes makes you want to cry book. The characters are infinitely human and infinitely suffering and they make poor choices and handle things badly and tear themselves up with guilt and shame and I could totally relate.

Not everyone will like these stories. They aren't about happy endings or redemption or really even about characters learning lessons from their mistakes. They are just about bad stuff that happens and how humans handle it. Sometimes there isn't really even an "ending" to a story, and you're left wondering... and I was ok with that, because often that's how life works as well; there isn't a clear-cut end to things, as much as we like to chase closure as a society, and we have to wonder what ever happened to that friend of ours we had the argument with in a bar and never saw again. At least, I do.

View all my reviews

Book Review - After the End

After the End by Amy Plum
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is pretty much one very long chase scene, with a couple of breaks for the main characters to catch their breath, and an unsatisfying ending intended to force you into reading the next book in the series (a trick that notoriously backfires with me - wrap things up in the main plot line, even if you leave the overarching storyline in suspense if you want me to read on!).

Juneau is an interesting character, as the female lead in the story. She grew up in an isolated community in Alaska, where all of the new generation of inhabitants believed their parents moved there post nuclear apocalypse in the 1980's. Except, of course, that apocalypse never happened, which causes her to lose faith in everything else she was taught growing up.

So you have a bit of a coming-of-age story and a bit of a romance, when you throw in her relationship with Miles, son of a drug company tycoon who is part and parcel of the chase she's subject to, and a bit of suspense, as of course as I mentioned above, the whole book is one long chase scene.

I often don't like magic and sorcery in books as it stretches my credulity a bit far at times, but it's well-placed here and I like the history and sources of "magic" here. It adds a fantasy element to the story as well, which makes this book hard to categorize.

If it weren't for the trick-playing ending I probably would have rated this as a four star book, but I really dislike authors playing those kinds of games with readers.

View all my reviews

Book Review - The Fifth Wave

The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Oh, the incredible drama of teenage girls.

If there is one thing - and really, there is only one thing - that annoyed me about this book it was how irritatingly dramatic and ridiculous teenage girls can be. That said, it's a very accurate characterization of a teenage girl, for what it's worth.

The 5th wave takes place in a post-alien-apocalypse world, where the few survivors are trying to make it through the 5th wave of attacks, so different from what anyone expected or made movies about, by an alien race bent on taking over the earth and making it their own. Though the main plot line belongs to Cassie, a teenage girl who has lost her mother to the plague and her father to a bomb and is trying to save her brother from the fate of the last wave, my favourite parts were the chapters dedicated to Ben, a young man the same age as Cassie - who went, in fact, to her high school. His character goes through amazing development and is fascinating to watch. Cassie, on the other hand, whines a lot, gets distracted by a hot boy, and does fairly typical teenage girl stuff. At least, as much as she can in the presence of an apocalypse.

I found this to be a very different take on aliens-take-over-the-planet. The author came up with a way to make the attacks very different from the typical ideas in this genre, which was refreshing. As well, some of the characters were intriguing, and I loved following their stories, as well as being left hungry to learn more about them (can't wait for the next installment in the series!).



View all my reviews

Book Review - Absolute Certainty

Absolute Certainty by Rose Connors
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Listened to the audiobook version of this with my husband. Solid mystery story that kept us engaged and entertained, but neither of us were big fans of the authors style of writing.

View all my reviews

Book Review - The Well

The Well by Catherine Chanter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I feel so blessed to have gotten a chance to read an ARC of this books. When it hits the shelves, you MUST read it, and I'll explain why.

I classed this as general fiction for shelving purposes, but really it's a little bit dystopia (that is to say, the rest of the population is living in a dystopian world of water shortages), a little bit murder mystery, and a little bit women's fiction, as everything is told from the perspective of a forty-something woman trying to come to terms with life after marriage, after some bad choices, and uncertain of her path.

Ruth and her husband have been through some tough times, like any other couple who have been together for twenty years. They think that maybe a change of scenery is what they need, so they disembark from London's city life and take up residence at The Well, an idyllic country estate. As the outside world slips deeper and deeper into an economic and political disaster due to intensifying drought, The Well remains green, with seemingly no limit to the fresh waster from its underground spring. But it's not only that; it rains there, when the rest of the country is turning to dust.

Some hate Ruth and her husband Mark, sure that they are somehow diverting other peoples water for their own purposes, especially the community of farmers. Others worship Ruth, and it is the intoxicating high of reverence, of specialness, of feeling wanted and of belonging that draws Ruth into a dangerous collaboration with a group of women that believe men have poisoned the earth. What do their beliefs mean for her husband Mark? For her grandson Lucien? You should read and find out.

The authors voice is reminiscent of Margaret Atwood, but with a fresh take on new issues. If this debut novel tells me anything, it is that I will be anxiously awaiting each new offering by the author!

View all my reviews

Book Review - The Fifth Assassin

The Fifth Assassin by Brad Meltzer
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

We got the audiobook version to listen to on our drive through SK. It was so boring we gave up after four hours. Dry as a bone and not one character we could care about.

View all my reviews

Book Review - The Actor and the Housewife

The Actor and the Housewife by Shannon Hale
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

While the premise is interesting - can married people of opposite genders be just friends? In my experience, yes - I found the book overwritten. In particular, the ending went several pages past where it should have, by way of a swath of unnecessary narrative exposition. I shouldn't have been surprised by that as it happens throughout the book.

Where this novel shines is the fun and witty dialogue, some of which was so awesome that I had to stop and read it to my husband, and it elicited some laughs from him as well. The characters are sometimes a little stereotypical, but when they open their mouths it can be sheer genius.

View all my reviews

Book Review - Don't Breathe a Word

Don't Breathe a Word by Jennifer McMahon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Faeries. Dark, creepy, wicked, mischievous Faeries. Also, family secrets, intrigue, mystery and thoroughly entertaining suspense.

View all my reviews

Book Review - Handle With Care

Handle with Care by Jodi Picoult
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What a time for this book to come into my life; during the moments when I am questioning our choice to adopt our children and trying to decide if we will - if we even can - proceed. A year or two ago, this book would have resonated very differently with me.

A year or so ago, for example, I would have been of the harshly-judging-Charlotte crowd. Even the idea of questioning the gift of a child, for someone like me who had wished for and struggles for motherhood only to lose her baby... Well, it was unthinkable. Unconscionable.

Now, though, I found someone I completely understood in Charlotte. I understood being misled about a child by someone you trusted, and how deeply and ferociously that can burrow into you. It doesn't matter how smooth your ready smile is, how easily the words "I can handle it" roll off your tongue. There is a great and all consuming sea boiling beneath.

I understood how broken a family can become. How broken friendships can become. I understood how it can stretch and strain and nearly destroy your marriage. I understood how you can wind up devastatingly alone. Ashamed.

I felt like I was reading about me. And it broke my heart. But it was beautifully done.

View all my reviews

Book Review - Devoted: 38 Extraordinary Tales of Love, Loyalty and Life with Dogs

Devoted: 38 Extraordinary Tales of Love, Loyalty, and Life With Dogs by Rebecca Ascher-Walsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Heartwarming, sweet collection of loving, devoted dog stories. Fabulous for dog lovers. Made me tear up and hug my dog. Lots. She approves of this book.

View all my reviews

Book Review - The Engagements

The Engagements by J. Courtney Sullivan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have very mixed feelings about this book. I found some of the characters annoying and frustrating and found myself so unhappy and bored when their stories came up in queue. Other stories I really enjoyed reading and wanted them to last longer. The writing is excellent, but if I can't feel invested in a plotline because of the characters, it makes the time invested in the book seem less than worthwhile.

View all my reviews

Book Review - Everyday Psychopaths

Everyday Psychopaths by Jonas Eriksson
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

So. Awful.

The writing is bad. The style is bad. The story is pretty bad. I couldn't find anything redeeming here. I didn't give one whit about any of the characters. It's gross (in multiple ways). Regret the price I paid for it, which was free.

View all my reviews