Sam

I like dark tales and this book came recommended all the time on Kindle Unlimited, so I gave it a try. It's very similar to the book I read earlier in December, An Age Of Winters by Gemma Liviero.

If you don't like books about religious zealotry and wildly misinterpreting the Bible to suit your means, this book has a lot of it. It also has a rampant ton of misogyny directed at the FMC, and Brom does a good job of having the woman stand up against it. She is a very strong and determined woman and highly motivated to prove the abusive men in her community wrong. However, it's not just them she's up against. She has to prove she's strong enough to withstand superbly strong supernatural forces who are actively hunting her. Every challenge she is up against, she fights hard and is resilient, even if that makes her an outcast.


The chapters switch viewpoint to viewpoint, which in here is a bit disjointing.

I feel like the ending could have been stronger, I don't feel as if justice was appropriately served in the writing, so the closure doesn't feel as satisfying as it could be.

I've been a big fan of T Kingfishers work this year. This is the fourth book by her that I've read in the last couple of months and I've remained impressed by her building on tales and her imaginative storytellings. That being said, so far this is the lowest ranking story by her that I've read.

I'm not unoptimistic about her books and I will keep reading more of them, she has turned me into a faithful reader of hers. But this one fell over a bit for me. It felt a bit cluttered and I had a hard time following the logic of the other-worldbuilding, and I think some of the setting crafting in the willow world didn't make a lot of sense. But maybe it's not supposed to and that sets you askew a bit.

Her character building is strong as ever, and the three main characters were relatable and likable. They had genuine struggles and the main character, Kara, was authentic. I think that's what helped keep the story going, that she had a good head on her shoulders and strong common sense. Her uncle Earl was very cute, I wish I had a lovable kind uncle like him. Simon was a likable token weird gay guy who made funny inappropriate jokes but it didn't feel like he was out of place.

The ending was not as “white-knuckled” as the bylines in the kindle details page made it out to be. It was creepy and of course there's some weird other-spacey magic going on. Kind of like hoodoo but not quite.

If you like books with other-world portals, or really liked Jeff VanderMeers Southern Reach series, you would probably enjoy this book.

This one was going to be taken away on Audible and it was only a 3 hour read so I got through it this morning in one sitting. It's a beautiful little story and quite idyllic, a frank recollection of Isak Dinesens time in Africa living among native tribes. She had a 600+ acre coffee plantation and without too much emotion or fanfare described some of her experiences but she mostly told stories about her times negotiating and working with her native neighbors and how she appreciated their cultures and way of doing things, and she was even the arbiter of justice for an accidental death.

I don't feel like there was racism or that she thought of the native tribes less than her as a European. I think she appreciated their stories and treated them as humans and gave them respect. I think that's mainly what the point of the book was.

Trigger warning, there is animal hunting and she did not glorify it.

Another fantastic take by T Kingfisher. I really like her reimaginings of folk tales and lore to create astonishingly creepy and addictive tales. She's becoming my go-to for misty and dark rainy stories with a haunting buildup.

Like with any supernatural tale, you know it's not going to hit you quickly but you can start to spot clues from the beginning. Things are out of place, someone dies mysteriously, something is not quite right. The story takes a moment to pick up but it's such a short story that it picks up relatively quickly.

I really enjoyed the main characters, Angus and Alex. I hope Kingfisher writes another book in the series with them encountering something else creepy, Alex Eastons wit would be wasted if she didn't.

Everyone knows this story. Everyone has heard of Ebenezer Scrooge, Bob Cratchett and Tiny Tim. How many people have sat down to read the original story instead of watching the movie and discovered how charming and beautiful the story is?

I've been a bit of a Scrooge this year concerning Christmas. I've had a lot going on this past couple months and it's been hard to be in the Christmas spirit. I haven't watched many Christmas movies this year nor did we put up a tree. I thought okay, I need to do something Christmas related, even though it can be small, let's just do something. So I picked out the audiobook, narrated by Tim Curry (I totally forgot he was an English actor) and it changed the whole story for me.

Since you don't really need a review of the book, I want to convince you to listen to Tim Curry's rendition of the story. He is SO good at the narration, it is so much better than reading the text. It is a performance and since we all know Tim Curry's work, he puts his all into this just like any other project. It made the story so much richer, involved, and appropriate for the setting.

That's really all I want to say about it, is if you haven't read it that way, you really should.

I keep seeing on lists and videos that this book is unforgettable, a must read before you die kind of book. And I had it on my shelf for a while before I decided to commit to it and read it.

I should have read this book years ago. I would have saved a lot of time wondering about things and I could have had Morries lessons so much sooner. It was poignant, beautifully written, and Morrie has so many wonderful insights. To know him through the pages was a treat. To get to have known him in person must have been a true delight. You don't come across people like him very often, because of the lessons in this book. I related very hard to Mitch and his relationship with his brother, I have a tense and terse relationship with my own brothers where the bridge to reconnect feels too long.

If you read this book you will feel reassurance, you will feel joy, and you will feel like crying. Go ahead and feel the emotions and let them run through you. Experience them and Morrie will even show you how to and that to experience the full effect of emotions is how you live. Maybe like me this will kickstart you into living your life with renewed intentions.

There is a reason this book is so highly related in many lists. I was recommended this book multiple times and I listened to it on Audiobook, which made it better for me.

When you pass The Statue Of Liberty and see the words inscribed on the base, (give me your poor, your tired and hungry..) it feels like this book is written from those words. In Pottstown Pennsylvania, the segregation is real but with all the unfairness of the world, the unwanted minorities band together in a heartfelt way. The Jewish community and the black community of Pottstown look out for each other, finding more similarities than differences to each other. They know how they're perceived, and the white Protestant population doesn't hesitate to remind them of their place in the world.

Their neighborhood is called Chicken Hill, and the titular Heaven and Earth Grocery Store serves the black and European immigrant community, and they band together around a young orphan black boy in danger. The book is full of small town examples of how we need to look out for one another, and how your found family can be created in your community.

I think this book is a strong contender for how the melting pot of America is supposed to be, where people of different cultures come together.

There are strong overlying threads of racism throughout the book. Multiple racial slurs are used, but make sense when taken in context (just so we're clear, they're never okay, but they're used within the confines of this book with appropriate historical use.) There are also more than one or two SA events. I just want to make you aware.

Well. Having never seen the movie adaptation, I came into this one unprepared. I knew it was on my bucket list and not one I wanted to skip, but even I had to bleach my brain with puppy videos intermittently through the book. Blatty is descriptive and he threads the needle through religion, psychology, and medicine, while also exploring themes that impact the family. He suggests that a child left to their own devices by an absent workaholic mother might be too open to suggestion, and he dives into a religious man's moral battle between doing what he's trained to do and reacting to what is right before his very eyes.

When I tell you there are some shocking moments in this book, I am not kidding. It is disturbing, a true horrific experience and I had a hard time during certain scenes. You just don't think an author would go there, writing things like that, and so descriptively, but it doesn't serve me well right now to have a vibrant imagination.

I had to sit with this a bit before reviewing it. Having lost my dad to a freak accident, I know plenty about grief and several quotes from this book stuck to the inside of my brain. In that way, Thiago was immensely relevant to my own life. I also sought to get away from my life after the event and struck out for somewhere new, and right about there the similarities ended.

This book is not just about grieving, it's also a supernatural experience and it's haunting. There's an entity that seems to be following Thiago and he can't get away from it. I would call it an “unreliable narrator” because he can't seem to put his finger on what it is and why everyone around him seems to be going crazy, and you can't quite place what's real or in his head, making you question your own perception.

There are large shock value moments and I'm not going to tell you what they are, but there's a good reason it's branded as a horror novel. I can see where Moreno drew from Stephen Kings Cujo, I'll just say that.

This book isn't worth the paper it's printed on. I actually couldn't find a copy in my area of Milwaukee, no bookseller is bothering to sell it, for good reason. I could barely make it through, I picked it up out of curiosity to see whether an ignorant woman could actually write a book, and I was right, she couldn't. And that's not being sexist, Greene does disservice to the gender and lowers the IQ of everyone around her. This book is full of racism, hatred, xenophobia, deeply internalized misogyny, and you could tell she absolutely did not bother to hire an editor, she hired a pay to publish company that will publish anything you pay it to, straight from a Word document to printing. Spelling mistakes, grammatical and punctuation and sentence errors abound, they take away from her fascist and nationalist agenda. I am not a MAGA supporter, and for any supporter saying this book is great, I suggest several weeks to months of therapy. This book is good for pulp but don't use it for compost, it's probably full of mercury that will poison your garden.

I've never been so shaken by a book in my life. I finished and the ending had me so deeply unsettled that my gut clenched and I couldn't breathe. I could only sit there and just... idk. It's a good book, poignant and the main character is naive throughout, but how is a privileged 9 year old supposed to know what was going on?

I love science history books. They're detailed, steeped with invention and discovery. I want to know why something was discovered, what purpose it serves, and how it helps us. I like learning about medical forensics and catching a killer using the minutest of details. This book had all that. It says it's a handbook, but it goes into detail of certain poisons in the 20s and 30s that were largely impacted by the Prohibition, going on at the same time. I learned more than I thought I would on that alone, which is a nice surprise. Blum went into each element in detail, and that surprised me itself. Each poison was not elaborate, it was often just one element, like mercury, radium, thallium, and arsenic. Each wreaked havoc on the human body in their own ways. She also went into, without saying, how important regulation of consumer products was, because during the Prohibition people were ingesting any alcohol they could get their hands on, and that was what killed them, because bootleggers would put anything into their wares, just to make it more intoxicating. I'm looking forward to reading her book The Poison Squad for more information.

It took me about a year to read this finally, but I'm glad I did.

What a crazy messed up book.

It wasn't quite my type of book but it did well to broaden my horizons and remember how being a young growing college student felt and how my interests changed with heartbreak.

Some of it seemed out of touch or it was good advice but not immediately applicable. I'm also not a practicing Christian so a lot of the religious relatability didn't feel like I could connect with it. However, a lot of her advice did strike home, and I had strong emotions while listening to it.

Spectacular advice from many people at the top of their fields. There's people you will recognize and their words are powerful and well picked. I marked this book up with pen and highlighter many times.

Great book about forensic science. I learned a ton and lent it to a friend because we're both into true crime. It was also sad because you never realize how much humanity you witness in the business of death.

Great book on the origins of public health and city planning.

I love books like this. It was fascinating and so medical, and I thoroughly enjoyed every bit of it. I don't get a chance to see these pathogens very often, and I get a little thrill when Dr. Nagami wrote about putting a patient on a “respirator,” because that's my speciality. I have a couple of other books by her, and I look forward reading them.

Awesome book. I love books about diseases (I'm weird) and plagues, and this one was perfect for me. I learned a lot about the Antonine plague, dancing plague, and I like how each chapter was almost arranged in a sort of essay on each hideous malady. I'm glad I wasn't born in the years where smallpox and Y. pestis were prevalent.

Jennifer, you did an amazing job with this book. You were funny, had me laughing out loud with nearly every page, and you made your characters human. You made me want to go back and punch Walter Jackson Freeman II in the face, and you can fist bump me later for it. You inspired me to go get Marcus Aurelius' essays. Thanks for opening up my world. (also I couldn't find that book you mentioned about Alexander Fleming. Thoughts??)

A work of art is something that moves you, that stirs emotion. For me, this book was exactly that. I was heartbroken at the plight of these girls, furious and sick of the runaround and duplicity of the radium corporations that only wanted to protect their backs. This is a story of how the girls sought compensation for their heavy medical expenses as a result of radium poisoning, and the long uphill battle they had to get there.

I suppose I was ignorant of what had happened in this corner of history, but now I can appreciate the impact of these events and what it does for my life. We don't spare a thought for OSHA, but it's because of the radium girls that OSHA exists. My job requires me to wear gloves when using Cavi-wipes, which explicitly told to us may cause cancer when in direct contact with skin. “Do not use as baby wipes or sanitary wipes on skin, it possesses carcinogenic properties.” That may not have happened if these court cases weren't fought. What if you get injured on the job and have to be examined and your workers comp has to see the results of tests performed? Thanks to these girls, you have a right to see your results too, because the company doctors examined them, poked, prodded, and withheld information from them that they couldn't even produce in court when subpoenaed, because they lost it all. But that now does not have to happen to you.

I appreciated reading this book, and it was a fast read for me, because it draws you in. One of the best parts about this book is the author inserts modern day dollar amounts for medical expenses paid back in the 20's. For example, in 1925, one of the girls' medical expenses for that year equaled to $270, which amounted to a modern $3,660. She enclosed each sum in parentheses right next to the retro number, which was enormously helpful for context. Kate made sure the science was broken down enough to follow, and there wasn't a heavy amount of legalese for the layperson to analyze. It read like a courtroom drama on TV, which really helped with understanding.

Could not finish - It was not what I thought it would be

These may be fiction but Holmes and Sir ACD taught me more about being observant and putting together facts and testing them against a theory.

This is the first Gillian Flynn book I've read, and I agree with what people say about her books. They are intense. They seize you up and spit you out and there's nothing else to say about it. I was ravenously reading this book all day, and it was fast. It was depressing, but it was sharp. It makes me slightly hesitant to pick up Gone Girl, but eventually I will pick it up.

Finally finished this one. I had to be in a certain mood to read this and it took me since January to finish it. Best tip, don't think this is going to be like the Amazon series, because it's vastly different. It's a straightforward read, and it can be a bit of a dry read, but near the end it starts to pick up and speed up.

There's a rich variety of characters, and there's certain nefarious characters from the Third Reich that show up, since that's the premise. The style gives a chapter to characters in turn, and you have to keep in mind that things are being done simultaneously, which if you're a Game of Thrones fan, that should be no issue.

Other than that, I had no issue with this, except that I had to will myself to read it at times, and it felt like it was a bit of a chore. But alternate history is pretty good, and a sobering account of what might have been if we lost WW2.