Christine

For me, this was like cotton candy. Airy, uncomplicated, and uniformly sugary. Do I normally prefer more nuanced desserts with varied textures and contrasting bitterness? Absolutely. But sometimes I want some cotton candy at the fair, and it's sticky-sweet and short-lived, but enjoyable enough in its own way.

Other 3-star reviews cover my feelings pretty well. I'm not upset that I read this - it was charming if insubstantial. I would certainly be interested in a different take on the same setup, where the characters were more fully drawn, and the protagonist had to learn, unlearn, and/or use various skills that got her out of her comfort zone as a warrior.

This was interesting, but the pacing felt weird. It's a well-drawn and intriguing world for sure, and this is a serviceable story. But it didn't pull me in and get me excited about what would happen next. But honestly, that's not too shabby for a first novel!

And I'm ride or die for Murderbot, so I'll probably wind up reading everything Wells has written. Maybe it's good that I started my comprehensive read with her first effort - it's probably only going to get better as I go!

Short but satisfying horror tale set at New Year's. Nothing very surprising, but fun nonetheless! I'm going to check out the rest of Demmer's holiday series [b:Dark Celebrations 50845736 Dark Celebrations Calvin Demmer https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1567423533l/50845736.SX50_SY75.jpg 71870346] - something that should be helpful to horror fans doing the 2023 Popsugar challenge!

I didn't really know what kind of book I was reading, and I guess that's on me. I tend to avoid too much foreknowledge so I can just experience a book. All I knew was this was a horror novel about a haunting in a house under construction - clever and intriguing premise!

Only, this isn't actually a horror novel. I'd say it's an attempt at a thriller with paranormal elements? I probably wouldn't have picked it up had I known. It's not scary, creepy, or even atmospheric. And honestly while thriller is not my favorite genre, I feel like this wasn't great as a thriller either. The entire premise depends on a bunch of adults believing in buried treasure in a way only little kids or Stede Bonnet would. It's ridiculous. (And it doesn't even make sense that there would BE treasure in the first place - don't get me started on that.) There's a twist of sorts, and it doesn't make sense - this whole book suffers from a lot of Fridge Logic.

But hey, at least the characters are annoying! Olive is actually OK overall - she's a 14yo and being annoying and naive is developmentally normal. Helen, on the other hand, is almost literally Too Stupid to Live, while Nate is sort of a blank slate that does whatever the current scene demands.

Honestly, this still had enough of an interesting premise and engaging historical mystery to be rewarding, if only it had been more efficient. It was very bloated and slow. Shortly after the 50% mark, I just started reading the last paragraph of each page, occasionally jumping back to read a bit more if I needed to fill in some blanks. I was able to follow the whole plot, the twist, and the answer to the mystery with no problem.

Even though I already knew the story, this was so much fun to read. The thing about Christie is she doesn't just plot whodunnits well, she is a wonderful writer all around. Everyone is a fleshed out human, there's good interplay (as always) between Poirot and his sidekick, and in the end this is a profoundly human story, not just a puzzle box.

The real curse of womanhood is that we never get to forget we have a body.

3.5 stars - this was distinctive, weird, and horrifying, and it weaves in the plight of the middle-aged, perimenopausal woman in a really artful way. Not quite a home run for me because it's a little long and meandering for a tale with basically no likable characters. (Note: this is not to say the characters are poorly drawn, or that we don't sympathize with them or even cheer them on at times. It's just that ultimately, I spent most of my time not rooting for anyone.)

After the prologue, I felt like I knew exactly what was going on, and got a little impatient with the middle of the story, like, “You already told us what the reveal will be - just reveal it already!” But even after the reveal there are some shocking and intriguing developments!

This is very disturbing and explicitly gory, with some passages suggestive of even worse (which we mercifully do not see come to fruition, but know has happened to people in the past). If you're looking for something merely creepy/ghostly, this is not it! But the violence serves the story and is effectively depicted.

All in all, this was a good read, and I very much appreciate the author doing something different and strange. I also think he wrote with remarkable sympathy and knowledge about living in a perimenopausal body! This was a cool theme to choose, and he used his research and consultations with women to good effect.

This was OK - the boys are very cute together. But it started to feel like every possible modern teen problem was being crammed into the story. It went from sweet slice of life with some earned drama to feeling like a particularly heavy-handed after school special.

I liked this, but it didn't quite pull me in. I felt like it was presented as a mystery, but also made it immediately obvious what the “secret” was. Like, if you look at the cover, you know exactly what's going on.

I liked the idea of a social group that gets their own pronouns, but I felt like there was a lot of tell-don't-show surrounding it that took up too much of this short tale.

I loved the characters of Alex, Miss Potter, Angus, and Denton, so that carried me along, and I like the idea of fleshing out The Fall of the House of Usher. It certainly had atmosphere, and there were some very creepy moments.

This was lovely, of course. It's got all of Terry and Neil's words, and some of the actors from the show, including David Tennant and Michael Sheen.

I ADORE this story.
Original hardcover I got in the 90s? ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Martin Jarvis-narrated audiobook? ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The TV adaptation? ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

But weirdly, this fusion of the 5-star text with the actors from the 5-star show was less perfect to me. It just didn't grab me as much. Maybe the presence of some actors made me miss the ones that weren't there? Or maybe a full-cast recording just detracts a bit from the flow.

Anyway, this is still better than most books you could read or listen to, but if you're new to this story, I recommend the original or the audio reading by Jarvis!

This can be looked at as either an impressively good creepypasta or an OK novel. I think the author has a lot of talent, but this book does show the importance of a good editor.

I highly recommend reading the prologue regardless - it's a little capsule creepy tale of its own, that I found incredibly effective.

The rest of the story has some truly scary, well-written horror as well, but it gets bogged down in repetition and some nonsensical character motivations. Also, I found it doubly wearing to read the cycle of Faye's nighttime woes and Felix's reactions, because it made the female character seem less and less capable and three-dimensional as it repeated.

I do appreciate the author's note about his decision to include indigenous American people as characters. Some might criticize it as the same old “mystical native understands magic,” but I think he succeeded in his effort to depict these characters as normal, multidimensional, modern humans who don't have mystical answers, and along with that he gives a good reminder that native peoples are many and varied - not a monolith by any stretch of the imagination.

All in all, this is well worth checking out. I just won't blame you if you wind up skimming some of the mid-to-late chapters.

If you like creepy weird fiction, but don't need it to be purely bleak, this one might be for you! I was immediately drawn in by the homey and lovable Uncle Earl and his cozily weird museum, but I wasn't sure where this story was headed. Then when supernatural/sci-fi stuff started to happen, I was here for it. But imagine my delight when I noticed the willows were not just a passing bit of background, and there were creepy funneled holes all over the sand - ‘HOLY COW is she embroidering on [b:Algernon Blackwood 1335601 The Willows Algernon Blackwood https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348548258l/1335601.SX50.jpg 2588003]?!' Yes, reader, she was, and it was almost entirely successful in my opinion. What a charge to realize a classic but largely unknown story by the author of [b:The Wendigo 1137702 The Wendigo Algernon Blackwood https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1181290361l/1137702.SX50.jpg 2482119] is the basis for this supremely unsettling, compelling horror story! This is less toward the hopeless Lovecraft/Ligotti end of the spectrum, and honestly more toward the Raimi end - there are seriously chilling and terrifying bits, but also almost a slapstick element at times, and a good deal of snark. For me, it worked!I guess technically this is a 4.5 for me due to some reliance on a couple of colossally stupid decisions by the protagonists, and one point that the readers can see perfectly clearly yet the main character misses in a way that starts to seem dense (but is defensible if you take the point of view that someone really experiencing these things wouldn't notice what we readers in our comfortable chairs can see much earlier).

This was cute! It's a nice, sweet story about embracing your weirdness and letting it connect you to others rather than separate you. It's all a bit surface-level and pat, with characters all immediately and unequivocally accepting different gender identities, sexualities, spiritualities, etc. But it's a middle-grade book and it's meant to be charming comfort media, not hard-hitting psycho-social dissection. And it's nice that lots of kids who deal with exclusion will see themselves depicted in a joyous, loving story where good wins out. For me, this is kind of a 3-star, but taking into account the intended audience, I say it's a solid 4-star.

This is more about feel, atmosphere, and characters than pure horror. However, when the horror comes, it's definitely effective and refreshingly weird. Overall I give it 3.5 stars, rounded up.

My favorite part was the perfect evocation of lazy summer days at a beach house, coupled with the sinister background fact that they're terribly isolated and literally cut off from civilization and help much of the time. This is definitely THE horror novel to save for a beach vacation (if you think you'll be able to sleep after sitting in the sand reading it)!

The other really cool element was the Weirdness. The house being swallowed by a dune, the unexplained rituals Odessa does, and India's photos of the house are all deliciously creepy and unsettling. I have no objection to crumbling Gothic manors in England as the setting for horror stories, but one set on the Alabama shore among the summer houses of a filthy rich family is pleasantly novel. And the sun, sand, and heat do not detract one iota from the horror - they add to it.

One thing that did detract slightly for me - this is a slow build. There is a macabre event in the very beginning, but then most of the book is about the characters, the family, and how they interact. It's well past the halfway point that we get to the serious scares. But the writing about the family is good, and it was still interesting even if it wasn't directly tied to horror.

I also disliked the depiction of Odessa as the quintessential Magical Black Woman. She's an essential character in a way, but she's mostly a plot device rather than a person. Even how she's referred to underlines that she's a bit less of a person than the other (white) characters. She's consistently referred to as “the black woman,” rather than “Odessa” or simply “the woman” or “she” - there are 39 instances of the phrase in the book and it was both grating and disrespectful. Luckily Odessa has one funny, lampshading line near the end where she asks why all the family keep looking to her for answers when she doesn't know more than they do, beyond some intuitions.

On the flip side of social progress and cultural awareness - I really enjoyed the portrayal of Luker. He's clearly gay, but the text only gestures at the fact. The book depicts the necessary secrecy and invisibility of homosexuality that prevailed in the 1980s by recreating it in the prose. So we hear that Luker is happily divorced, that he vacations on Fire Island, and that he spends some time in town visiting a man who has “shared interests.” One sees McDowell (who had been in a committed relationship with a man for over a decade at the date of publication) putting some of himself in the story, with a sympathetic portrait of a gay man as a fully fleshed out, three-dimensional character. It's nice.

Overall, this is an excellent entry in Southern Gothic literature. Even with some flaws, I recommend it to anyone who wants some Southern family weirdness capped off with effective supernatural weirdness.

This was the perfect book to read while under the weather and quarantining while I waited for my PCR test results. It's simple and predictable enough to be easy on a foggy brain, but leaves enough enticing breadcrumbs that I wanted to follow to the end.

That said, I'm a little annoyed this is shelved as Horror. It's much more like a culty take on The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window than proper horror or Gothic fiction.

I feel this could have used some more ambiguity, and I would have appreciated a more empowering ending for our hero. But I was game for the ride. Whenever the main plot seemed a little too blatant or the workings of the cult strained my suspension of disbelief, I'd get a glimpse of Maeve's childhood that propelled me forward.

There's good character development, a compelling parallel to real life political horrors, and a creepy mansion in the mountains. It was a fun, quick read!

This was a pleasantly fresh and disturbing little story. I thought it did a great job of mining cultural misogyny and the “nice guy” without being at all preachy. It's weird and a bit gross and every character elicits some level of empathy and some level of distaste. Cosmic horror delivered via a very human, character-driven story.

This is a short, punchy send-up of Instagram healthism, much like [b:Puritea 60702461 Puritea Lucy Leitner https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1648419381l/60702461.SY75.jpg 95698894]. I didn't like this one quite as much, but it was still fun. I admire the level of ambivalence such a brief, broadly satirical tale has evoked for me. Is the story just viciously derisive of @wellnesswarrior497? Or is it truly sympathetic to her on some level? Is she getting what she needs/deserves, or is she a victim of a horrific cabal?Also, the description of the sensory deprivation room was really chilling - that will stay with me for a while! Very impressive for a mere four paragraphs!

A tiny little snack* of social horror that packs a fun punch!

*gluten-free of course!

KPS is not, and I say this with absolutely no slight intended, a brooding symphony of a novel. It's a pop song. It's meant to be light and catchy, with three minutes of hooks and choruses for you to sing along with, and then you're done and you go on with your day, hopefully with a smile on your face.

Yes, everyone is including this quote from the Author's Note in their reviews, but I can't resist. This is such a perfectly self-aware encapsulation of the novel. This is fun. There are sympathetic characters who make jokes and become friends. There's bonkers sci-fi stuff, some action, and eventually there's an overarching plot arc that comes to a satisfying conclusion. It does take more than half the book for the main conflict to really come to the fore, but the setup before that is a lot of fun, so who cares?

Also - I love that the main character could be any gender. In general I could have used a little more physical description of characters (and especially of kaiju!), but this choice was lovely.

ALERT: The Author's Note at the end is not to be missed, even if you don't normally read them.
I must pause to recommend reading the Author's Note. It bumped this book from 4 to 4.5 stars for me. Everyone will relate, and it just made me feel seen and understood, and like we all went through something together. I'm glad it will be there decades from now to be read by young nerds who view 2020 through a fuzzy, history-class lens, and give them a surprise: a very poignant, personal time capsule of what this time felt like to live through.

I'll close with a quote from Murderbot (who is lovingly name-dropped in Chapter 1 - yes, I cheered!) that almost perfectly summarizes KPS:

(It was called Worldhoppers, and was about freelance explorers who extended the wormhole and ring networks into uninhabited star systems. It looked very unrealistic and inaccurate, which was exactly what I liked.)

Pretty good but not my favorite Christie as far as characters and banter. And the ending is a real bummer.

This was cute, and a reasonably interesting mystery. But just interesting - not compelling or fascinating. The hook is supposed to be Molly and her distinct outlook on life, but her character felt a bit muddy, having limitations, advantages, and quirks inconsistently and as required for the plot. A fine diversion, but I prefer Christie.

This was fine. It was sort of all over the place (everything from how to stay on top of laundry to how to create deep friendships), and it had the underwhelming thesis of “moderation in all things,” which Hesiod beat her to by about 2700 years. Still, there were some good reminders about applying The Middle Path in specific circumstances.

However, the level of Jesus talk in this was a real distraction. It's not clear from the blurb/cover that this book is explicitly for Christians - there's not just references to the author's life that include church, etc., but advice about how Yahweh loves the reader, blah blah blah. Not what I was looking for.

This was good, but I would rather have seen the actual story unfold, without the frame tale. I couldn't have cared less about Chih and their dumb bird. Needs more badass empress!

A lovely story, told by lovely actors, for a lovely cause. It delights me that Gaiman plays the character Neil Gaiman, and Jewel Staite is perfect. This is a small bit of airy confection, but also speaks to a timely and important issue.

Wholesome smut - 10/10, will read the other Brown Sisters books.

Plus, I NEED a book about Gigi. NOW.

600+ pages absolutely flew by. I couldn't wait to find out what happened next! Scary bad guys, overwhelming odds, unexpected hope, grudging sympathy for the devil, and Chrisjen Avasarala with the best quote I've seen in years!

If you watched the Expanse series and you're jonesing for more, I highly recommend jumping in on this book - you'll be caught up enough by the show to start right in.