altlovesbooks

"History is littered with dead good men."

I…. don’t know what to make of this book. It’s a good book! Lots of people agree! Fabulous worldbuilding! Interesting characters! Great prose! I just came away from parts of the book wondering if there was maybe too much worldbuilding in the first, oh, 60% of the book, and not enough crumbs of action dropped to keep me invested.

There’s not one or two viewpoints to summarize here. Instead, we get a whole fully developed cast of characters we bounce between, with their own involvements and plot lines going on within the world the author fleshes out for us. It isn’t until near the end of the book that some of these characters start meeting up with one another and the plot starts moving though, so if slow burn epic fantasy isn’t your thing, you might have a hard time getting through it.

I will say that as soon as the plot started moving, I was all in on what the author was bringing. I also hear that book two is when things really hit their stride, so I’m looking forward to that experience as well. Getting to that point took me a while, though, and I kept putting the book down for other reads and only reading it in small chunks up until the last 20% or so.

There’s definitely something here though, and I’m going to try and make time for book two sometime soon before I forget everything from book one.

DNF at 12%.

My husband is a prior marine, and hearing a marine talking marine things in what was supposed to be a horror/thriller book just didn't do it for me. I know the acronyms, I know the terminology, I know the concepts.... but I'm here for thrills and scares and I didn't get a feeling like it was going to be that thrilling/scary.

Unless you count hearing FOB over and over again terrifying.

This seemed like a promising take on the whole retold mythology genre. Rather than it be an actual mythological character, we have (Pan)Dora Blake in London in 1799, unwilling employee to her uncle who’s running her deceased parents antiquity shop into the ground one forgery at a time. Her deceased parents were killed during an excavation disaster a decade ago, leaving Dora orphaned and stuck at her uncle’s mercy. A strange crate arrives for her uncle one day, and Dora makes it her mission to see its contents – a giant Grecian vase, in pristine condition. Dora, now with aspirations of jewelry design, hopes to use this vase to fuel inspiration for her jewelry pieces, but gets sucked into the vase’s origin story, one that involves her parents and her uncle as well.

Unfortunately, I didn’t think the book lived up to its ultimate goal. While I appreciate the different spin on the genre, the book felt really meandering in places, and it seemed like Dora’s motivations changed depending on when you checked in on her. (Mild plot spoilers here)either she wanted to take over her parents shop, as it had once been a great thing in London, or she wanted to wash her hands of the whole thing and make jewelry. This made her character feel a little inconsistent and changeable depending on what was going on at the time.

It also felt like nothing happened, despite there being this mystery hanging over the entire book. I don’t know if it was as product of the writing or wanting more of a mystery than we got, but even though there were some standout scenes, I honestly felt kind of bored with the whole thing. (Large ending/plot spoilers)I sort of wanted the vase to be more of a thing than what it was, which was a vessel for a message from her parents to her. There were some hints and intimations that there was something supernatural about it, but I guess that amounted to nothing in the end, and it left me a bit disappointed.

It’s an adequate book, but nothing I’d probably recommend to anyone. Perfectly average, I guess.

I greatly enjoyed this adventure, and the afterword about the actual person. The audiobook narrator was also spectacular. Highly recommend.

Shanghailanders is an ambitious debut story about a super rich Shanghai family told in reverse order from 2040 back to 2014. The book opens as the family has basically ended – the children have grown up, grown apart, the husband and wife argue fairly frequently and are apart more often than together. Then, each chapter takes the story back a few years to see how the family got to that point. Each chapter dials the time period back a few years, and follows a different member of the family initially (the three girls, the husband, the wife), and then starts also including various members of the household as well (a driver, a nanny, etc.) to paint a more full story of this family’s life.

The prose of the book was what ultimately kept me reading. The author has a way with words that really painted the scenes, the cities, the different ways the family has of interacting with one another. Ultimately, though, I left disappointed in the book, because it felt like the reverse way of telling the story didn’t add anything. There wasn’t any real payoff at the end for reading the story backwards, and at more than one point in the book I found myself wanting to know what happens as a result of the chapter, not what came before.

There’s a good story here, I just wish it were told differently.

I received an ARC copy free through Goodreads Giveaways.

Nope.

Every time I try and read something from the thriller/mystery pile of books people recommend to me, I come away disappointed. Maybe it's me?

The rest of this will be in spoilers. Know that there's heavy ending spoilers here.

Okay, so I have a major problem with authors who try so hard to be smarter than their readers, and this book had that in spades. When The Twist happens in the last 2o% of the book or so, I think us, as the readers, are supposed to just ignore the first part of the book and pretend like it never happened, because after The Twist it just doesn't matter anymore. The author's doing the "GOTCHA!" finger guns in the background, and we're supposed to ignore the fact that the entire book was written in first person and thus in the mind of the actual killer, and none of this is even hinted at. All for the sake of The Twist and The Gotcha. Her mind, her thoughts, all of it indicates this is her first time in the house, and yet if she's the killer, it very clearly isn't. It feels like lazy storytelling.

None of the characters are likeable. Except maybe the real estate agent Judy, who knew better than to go driving out to a house in bumfuck nowhere in a blizzard and who has high standards for the houses she shows. You go girl, and good on you for staying out of the book.

I gave it a star for being a quick read, and it at least kept me reading until the end, if only for maybe the wrong reasons.