altlovesbooks

"The problem with aging is not that it's one damn thing after another--it's every damn thing, all at once, all the time."

Read alikes:

• Mal Goes to War by Edward Ashton for some more humor-based sci-fi involving observations of the humans around him. Less story-based and more character-based, though.
• On Basilisk Station by David Weber for some more military sci-fi in space, a bit more serious, a bit higher stakes, and a treecat.
• Basically anything by Andy Weir

I waffled on this book a lot as I read it, because I liked the beginning and the setup of the story, kind of disliked the middle's episodic feel, and was brought back in a bit by the ending that didn't quite hit as hard as I wanted it to but still felt appropriate. I settled on 4 stars, but it's more of a 3.5 rounded up.

John Perry is an old man getting older. His wife died of a stroke, leaving him, a 75 year old man, bereft and ready to move on. Moving on meaning, signing up for the military like him and his wife agreed to at 75, of course. At retirement age, people are given the option to enlist, get rehabilitated, and get sent to the front lines of the ever expanding front of the human's space expansion. So he gets shipped out, gets a new body, and gets introduced to the intricacies of interstellar diplomacy where the biggest, best equipped force wins. Perry goes through training, meets a crew of fellow old people he clicks with, and the rest of the book is him getting used to this new interstellar world where suddenly the humans might not actually be the best at everything.

It's a fun book. Humor is used liberally throughout to soften otherwise impactful things in Perry's life, which kind of turned me off in the beginning but brought me around again by the end. It's also a very surface-level/shallow book too, in that there's interesting ideas brought up, but not a lot of actual musings by Perry on how it's impacting him. Which, I guess, fine, compartmentalization is the soldier's way of coping, but as a reader I felt a little dissatisfied with how little any of what was going on seemed to impact Perry at all.

The middle of the book is a lot of Perry going someplace, doing a thing, and returning victorious, never to refer to the thing again. It felt a bit episodic and not really part of the overall story, which made it a bit of a drag to get through. Maybe this was world building to set up later books? It's hard to say. A lot of things felt weirdly paced in this book too, where we gloss over large swaths of time in the beginning, and by the end So Many Things are happening All At Once.

Finally, I thought the ending was a bit of a letdown considering the buildup. Large ending spoilers here: I wasn't really expecting Jane to stay in Perry's life, but their whole "relationship" felt so rushed here as to be unbelievable. He meets her, they mutually agree that she isn't his wife anymore, but then just kidding they start spending time together under the guise of her wanting to know who she was, and then they're talking about retiring on a farm together. I feel like a whole lot more needed to be said/done before even Perry, with decades of life with his wife, would be fine with accepting New Jane. The action part of the ending even felt a little perfunctory, given the buildup about how dangerous the mission was supposed to be. Not a whole lot of pages are dedicated to the conclusion I was expecting. There's 7 books in this series though, so maybe the intent is to keep going and that this never was supposed to be an ending to anything.

Fun, but a little shallow. I might read the second book, to see how things progress.

Read alikes:

Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic by Jennifer Niven for another female perspective stranded someplace cold

Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition by Buddy Levy for a ship instead of a wagon train, with a side dish of implied cannibalism

I enjoyed this book, but I thought there was an awful lot of extraneous information thrown in to pad out the page count than I was expecting. Not that any of the info was bad or anything, but there's an awful lot of tangents thrown in that kind of took me out of what we were there for.

We get the whole backstory and leadup to the Donner Party's inevitable stranding, from wagon train forming to life on the trail, and everything in between. We're treated at regular intervals to side tangents about how life was on the trail, what the various Donner Party guests (hehehe) might have experienced, with a ton of historical factoids thrown in as well. It's all clearly researched, it just felt a little slapdash in the beginning.

But then the party gets stranded, the snow starts falling, and things get really grim, really fast. We read this with the benefit of GPS in our pockets, so it's easy to forget how a whole company of people could be taken in by one man's (charlatan's) claims of an easy pass through the mountain. It's incredible to me that people not only survived their ordeal, but came out the other side not entirely crazy from what they went through.

A really compelling read once the party actually starts, but a bit of a slog to get there.

"As big as the world is, Nassun is beginning to realize it's also really small. The same stories, cycling around and around. The same endings, again and again. The same mistakes eternally repeated."

I don't even know how to summarize this book, the capstone on what will probably make my shortlist of favorite fantasy series ever.

I loved the interweaving of stories in this one especially. You get the current viewpoints from characters you've already grown to love struggling through a Season. In the middle of these stories, you also get chapters from a new viewpoint telling their story (spoilers) from the very far past. These two together paint a whole picture of how we got here and why, bringing you to some real "A-HA!" moments as you put pieces together.

The last few chapters in particular were spectacular, in a series full of spectacular chapters. I simultaneously didn't want these characters to get to their final stages, and also couldn't stop reading. Too many really great series never end up sticking the landing, and I was afraid this one would be no different. I was mistaken, in all the best ways.

"You ever see a movie where people went to space and things went well?"

In hindsight, this did read like a movie or a TV series or something, all the zingy lines in all the right places, all the feelings of dramatic pauses and flashbacks, all the clearly delineated character types and roles, but like, I thought it was kinda fun. It kind of reminded me of a bit more cerebral Armageddon, only instead of landing on an asteroid and mining it, they loop around it and screw up their lives.

We have a motley crew cobbled together by the greatest minds at NASA (or at least the ones paid off the most by the presidency), set to loop around Titan, take some readings For Science, and come back for some great science PR and photoshoots. Halfway through their 2-year trip, though, there's some sort of (not clearly explained) accident. But the crew make it through in one piece and return, but the lives they left behind aren't the same ones they come back to. Husbands and wives and boyfriends that were out of the picture previously are suddenly back in as if they'd never left. Jobs are different. Strained familial relations are suddenly patched up. The crew are separated, aren't allowed to compare notes, but are expected to just...drop back into these lives they suddenly aren't comfortable with. But when they start clandestinely comparing notes behind the scenes, the danger ramps up as suddenly they become expendable.

So, I thought this was fun. There's multiple POVs here amongst all the crew members, so we get little glimpses of their lives before they leave on their voyage, during the voyage, and then afterwards as well. There's a slew of diverse backgrounds here, enough that it feels a bit like they ran through a checklist of character stereotypes to cover, but at least it kept the characters from feeling the same. There's some casual Fiction Science used here by the brain of the group to explain what they think has happened, and it's...fine. Easy to understand, but it is a bit handwavey for the sake of "we need a scientific explanation for this stuff". It definitely feels like a movie.

I do wish there was more of an ending, even if additional books are planned. Ending spoilers here: The book basically ends on a cliffhanger involving an entirely new POV that wasn't used at all during the book, and nothing is really resolved, explained, or otherwise given to the reader to feel rewarded for finishing the book. I feel like this story could have used a smaller, less-pressing issue to resolve within the book, keeping the overall larger "wtf is going on" problem to span multiple books. It just didn't feel like a lot of payoff. There also wasn't much space involved in this book, so if you're here for some crazy space shenanigans, this might not be the one for you. I didn't mind it so much because it felt like the real story was the crazy life changes and not the journey, but YMMV.

Fun if you can turn your brain off and enjoy the movie. Cast some actors in the roles in your brain and have at it.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Read alikes:

Everything I suggested from book one plus

The Splinter in the Sky by Kemi Ashing-Giwa for some imperialism/colonialism discussion with a sci-fi/fantasy feel

I feel like the author read some feedback about the first book and decided to do more everything in the second book. We get more POVs. We get more action. We get more Mahit x Three Seagrass. We get more political maneuvering. We get more navigation of complex societal issues. Just....a lot here.

Mahit is taking a victory sabbatical on Lsel Station, thoroughly over everything that's happened to her and needing some breathing room (a whole space's worth) between her and Three Seagrass. Unfortunately Teixcalaan has gone to war against a strange alien race they can't seem to communicate with, but never fear, Three Seagrass is confident she and Mahit can get the band back together and figure this out. Turns out first contact with an alien race that doesn't communicate in understandable language is hard though, and it's a race between getting the two sides talking and Teixcalaan getting fed up and wiping their home planet out.

In addition to Mahit's viewpoint, we get other POVs from Three Seagrass, Six Antidote (the 90% clone of the emperor), and Nine Hibiscus (fleet captain of the Teixcalaan forces). Each of these brings something to the literary table, and it kind of felt like Mahit's viewpoint takes a backseat to these other personalities now in the story. I particularly took to Six Antidote's viewpoint, struggling on the Teixcalaanli homeworld to be taken seriously when he says "no, really, I mean it when I say don't kill the aliens". There's still the same political/language focus in this book as there was in book one, but with higher stakes. It also felt like the plot flowed a little better in this book than in book one, nothing felt rushed, everything felt like it had the proper number of pages.

I think overall I liked it better than book one, but only a little bit. Both are really great books. Highly recommend for a different sort of sci-fi.

"It's funny the decisions you make because you like someone, and then your whole life is different."

I sat on this review for 11 days while I let this book rattle around in the back of my head. In the moment after finishing it, I was infuriated with the ending. Then I let it sit with me for a while, and slowly realized what it was the author was trying to show with the ending. Then I let it sit with me a little while longer until a book I was originally going to give, like two stars, turned into a four star book. It's not a perfect read for me, and I struggle to know who to recommend it to, but it really is a beautiful book for the right sort of person at the right time of their life.

Rich girl but unpopular Marianne grows up with poor guy but popular Connell. Connell's mom cleans Marianne's house, and that's how the two know each other privately, but at school they pretend they're strangers for nebulous school popularity reasons (the kind that make so much sense in school but really don't when you look back on them as an adult). The two fall in teen love, then out of love, then in love, then out of love, ad nauseam for the rest of the book. You see, the two of them each have their own personal issues that color how they approach life and relationships, which drives the two apart as much as it brings them together. This book is about their orbiting of each other.

This book took a while to grow on me. I don't normally enjoy books where the entire plot is just two people struggling with a relationship, but somewhere along the way I started really understanding (if not agreeing with) Marianne and Connell and the trauma lens they view the world through. I also came right around on the (abrupt) ending from hating it in the moment to really getting why it ended the way it did. Ending spoilers here: At first I really wanted closure for whether Marianne and Connell stay together, but then I realized that the lack of closure is the whole point. Marianne doesn't want to commit to this relationship (again, again, again), and her closing line shows the relationship destruction cycle starting all over again. It really was a great ending, in retrospect after thinking about it for a bit.

This book really is nothing but relationship whingeing though, so if that's not your jam I probably would pass on it. There's also no quotation marks, which wasn't the deal breaker I thought it was going to be, but could annoy someone else. It really does say a lot that the writer managed to keep me engaged with so many reasons for me to put it down.

Idk, give it a try if you enjoy watching relationship train wrecks?

Readalikes:

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver for that crazy family drama in a foreign setting

Two Old Women: An Alaskan Legend of Betrayal, Courage and Survival by Velma Wallis for a bite-sized story from Athabascan legend about exiled old women surviving in the Alaskan wilderness

Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition by Buddy Levy for a non-fiction historical account of survival on a ship in the arctic

Leni is an unfortunate daughter born to a mother and a father who are both equally messed up in different ways. Her father (Ernt) was a POW in the Vietnam War, and returned with PTSD that manifests as volatility. Her mother (Cora) copes with this by becoming a doormat and revolving everything around capitulating to her husband and making sure nothing sets him off. She loves him, after all. Ernt is given a house in the Alaskan wilderness through the estate of a fallen soldier, and the three of them leave their suburban life for the wild unknown. But Alaska isn't for the faint of heart or weak of character, and Leni finds herself struggling to cope with the very real dangers of the Alaskan wilderness and also the very nebulous and more terrifying danger of her father.

This book read like it should be on a YA shelf. Not that it's bad, it's written quite well actually, but it lacks any sort of real adult feel to the story. There's certainly dark drama here, but nothing really strays much further than what you'd find on your teen's shelf in a library today. I have a hard time connecting with teen problems, I freely admit, so it was a struggle reading through so many issues stemming from hormones and forced proximity due to their small community.

I also struggled accepting the decisions the characters made basically for the entirety of the book. Leni's mom especially frustrated me, (book spoilers here) for the amount of abuse she handwaved away because she loooooooooves him, and for how she convinced Leni to believe they were a loving family for so long. While I understand I'm not an authority on the subject, there was ample time and motivation to separate herself and her daughter from this abusive man. She had resources with her rich family, which is a lot more than most abuse victims have, she was just unwilling to swallow her pride and use them. Leni, too, had an entire support system around her in her community that she could have made use of, but chose not to for nebulous family reasons.

I also feel like the book was weirdly paced. We spent a ton of time building up the family in Alaska, getting them established, setting down roots, meeting the neighbors so to speak, then suddenly we're hurtling through the rest of the book. The last third of the book was written like a Hallmark Movie special, as the author tried to cram in as many dramatic plot twists and elements as she could before the book ends. My already stretched credulity snapped near the end.

At the end of the day it's still a Kristin Hannah book though, so the writing is impeccable, and she knows how to set a scene. But I didn't like this one nearly as much as I loved The Women, and I'm a little sad about that.

"Nothing touched by the Empire stays clean."

Gonna try something new with this book (and going forward?) where I provide some similar feeling books/themes up front. Read if you like:

the political/social bits of Ann Leckie / Ancillary Justice

unique/intricate naming systems like from Yoon Ha Lee / Ninefox Gambit

extensive linguistical discussion in spaaaaaaaaace

Mahit Dzmare is an ambassador from Lsel Station sent to the Teixcalaanli Empire to replace the previous ambassador who hasn't checked in with Lsel Station in years. In fact, Mahit comes armed with a brain device containing the ambassador's memories (the same device all stationers come with, containing their ancestors memories), and it's 15 years out of date. Turns out the previous ambassador, Yskandr, is dead, and Mahit's brain device starts malfunctioning almost out of the gate. She arrives in Teixcalaan at a poor time, however, as the emperor is getting up there in years and there's an imminent power struggle between the three candidates for the throne. So while Mahit is trying to investigate the cause of the previous ambassador's death (foul play involved), she also finds herself in the middle of an impending civil war, and the constant threat of Lsel Station being assimilated by this larger culture.

Okay so right out of the gate, I'm either going to scare you away from reading this or intrigue you more. If person names like "Three Seagrass", "Five Agate", "Twelve Azalea", and "Two Lightning" don't bother you, you'll probably do fine. I thought the naming convention of Teixcalaanli names was interesting but hard for me to grasp and remember who was who. There's also extensive linguistics discussion in this book, mostly about Teixcalaanli language and poetry conventions, none of which I really did much with mentally. Finally, this is way more of a political thriller in a sci-fi setting than it is a sci-fi book, I think. With Mahit being an ambassador, we get a lot of clandestine meetings with various political figures and scenes involving Mahit and Three Seagrass discussing the political affiliations of various Teixcalaanli people that make an appearance in the story.

Despite all of that, I actually mostly enjoyed this book when I just let it happen. The world is interesting, though I wish the pacing had been a bit more spread out. The entirety of the book feels like it takes place in less than a week, and somehow despite that still feels like it has a slow beginning. There's a lot of discussions, mentally and between Mahit and Three Seagrass about various topics like cultural assimilation, the role memories play in personhood, racial and social divides, and more. It almost felt like as soon as things actually started happening plot-wise, we were already halfway through the book. The ending is short but satisfying, I think. Mahit has some massive plot armor.

A mostly enjoyable book, but I don't think it's for everyone.

"How different their lives might have been had he become a professor or lawyer. Carpenter or farmer. Had he studied anything else besides the ways and whys people killed each other."

With her previous book, World of Curiosities, set back in the Three Pines, I thought for sure we were back on track with the same feels that attracted me to Louise Penny's books in the first place. Not so much, actually. Maybe the last book was a fluke. This book was a mess about...monks and domestic terrorism? And also Sûreté corruption, because what would a Penny book be these days without that looming specter that never seems to resolve itself, or does and then comes back again. I finished this book not even 10 minutes ago, and I'm struggling to summarize things beyond that, honestly. The ending was a frantic mess I didn't quite follow.

I also love/hate that the author used the Two Wolves indigenous peoples story, which is a fake story to begin with created by Billy Graham (yes, that televangelist) in a book he wrote in the 70s, as if it were a serious thing. And then titled both this book and the next one after it. All I can think of is all of the two wolves memes I've seen since the early 2000s, to be honest.

There's not a lot I can say about this book that wouldn't be rehashing my complaints about her other books. This is another book not set in the Three Pines, does not include any of the Three Pines inhabitants beyond a few lines spoken by either Ruth or Olivier, and definitely doesn't include a lot of good food descriptions. In fact, Gamache eats at a diner with moldy food, to give you an idea of how far exactly opposite the cozy mystery feel spectrum we're at. We rehash more of the police force being corrupted/senior leadership being corrupted plots. The ending is a convoluted work that I didn't quite follow, and isn't even entirely resolved in this book. And the author has returned. To using. Short. Choppy. Sentences. For effect? I don't know.

If I weren't already 19 books deep, I'd probably quit. It's sunken cost fallacy, but I guess I have to see it through now. Maybe that's what she's counting on.

This is a messy book, so please know that before diving in sight unseen. My husband asked me what this book was about when we were standing in line for something, so I took a crack at summarizing it for him. Here's my best attempt:

So, there's an underlying system behind everything called the Skunkworks. And when I mean everything, I mean really everything, for this universe. It also connects with other universes, to further complicate things. Ellie is one of the people tasked with keeping the Skunkworks going, along with her cousin Daniel. Ellie's mother is dying though, and Daniel's keen sense of the Skunkworks obligates him to show Ellie that a strange setup was created to keep her mother alive (barely, in pain). This setup is also impacting the Skunkworks in other, less obvious ways, creating bugs and glitches in the system that manifest themselves as issues with universal physics. Ellie chooses to dismantle this system, alienating her from her sister Chris, her family, and other maintainers of the Skunkworks in the process. Ellie wants to make things right with Daniel's help, but it involves digging around to discover who set up the system in the first place and uncovering uncomfortable family truths in the process.

So, right off the bat, I want to say that I had a lot of fun with this book. Ellie and Daniel are great together (as cousins, weirdos), and their interplay made up most of my enjoyment of this book. Alongside their antics is the rest of the book though, and I had problems with it. I couldn't figure out if I'm too dumb for whatever science the author was presenting here, or if that's what the author was counting on so I wouldn't ask too many questions. Because there's a lot of at least science-adjacent terminology and situations here, and I came out the other side not entirely sure if I grasped what I had just read.

I also found Ellie and Chris's relationship problematic at best, but maybe that was the point. Ellie's blinders regarding Chris are astronomically large, and I was frustrated at several points of the book where Daniel and others would try and get her to confront the fact that Chris was not a good person, and Ellie would refuse. By the end of the book I think a resolution was supposed to happen, but even that felt unfinished, leaving me unsatisfied with things as they stood.

But in spite of the glaring flaws above, I really did enjoy reading this book. I'm not sure I can point to why, but I did. There's a lot of familial guilt to unpack here, and Daniel makes a good foil to Ellie, and I enjoyed them together.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a free eCopy in exchange for an honest review.

"Time is an intentional thing. You have to look after it, and it will look after you."

I feel like there's a good book in here, or the good idea of a book, but I wasn't sold on some of the decisions made by the main character for the sake of the plot, and the worldbuilding left a lot to be desired. I really loved the idea of this astral library outside of time housing people's memories, but it seemed under described, under utilized, and kind of a letdown.

Lisavet is a girl out of time. Her father, owner and creator of magical timepieces that allow the user to access a vast library of memories, deposits her there to keep her safe during Kristallnacht, swears he'll come back for her, and never does. She's trapped without a watch of her own to get back, and thus grows up in the stacks of this mysterious library. Other people have access to this library, timekeepers who enter the library to burn books of memories, but Lisavet soon makes it her mission to preserve these memories that others want destroyed. It's through this saving of burning books that she meets Ernest, a timekeeper for the Americans, working under Jack, head of the timekeeping organization. As is the way of these things, the two become lovers, until Lisavet learns some ugly truths about the American timekeepers organization and a miscommunication (ugh) drives the two apart.

So I loved Lisavet and her goals in the beginning of the book, even if the burning of the books of memories aren't well explained. Even Ernest, after Lisavet and him become an item, doesn't seem to be able to explain why the timekeepers do what they do, except some vague notion about nation sovereignty. Preserving memories/books/whatever just appeals to me. But Lisavet's character and motives entirely changes after (major plot spoilers here) she has Amelia. Suddenly she's this ruthless, heartless killer of memories, all in the name of keeping Amelia safe. It just rings hollow late in the book. I know it's supposed to show the lengths she's willing to go to for Amelia, but some of the things she does is downright horrible, and I'm not sold on the abrupt nature of her character shift. It's kind of telling when I was commenting early on in the book about how much I loved Lisavet as a character and how much I hated Moira.

I didn't think the library was all that well explained, and as I've mentioned here already, nothing seemed well explained. The magic/memory system seems handwavy with rules and limitations only when convenient and no real grasp of why the timekeepers were doing what they were doing. Jack as a villain was the most villainest of villains, very flat as a character, which is unusual when the author took such care with Lisavet, Ernest, and Amelia. I did love how the author did dialogue and internal thoughts, very descriptive and moving, but anything external, like a scene or descriptors or anything seemed lacking. The time jumps between characters was also jarring in places, particularly near the end when things started converging. I got really confused as to who/which character was the POV character and when sometimes when listening to the audiobook.

The love story between Ernest and Lisavet was sweet, however, and I did like how they always managed to find each other again. I just wish the rest of the book held up to keep me interested.

"His risk is mine, and if we fall, I shall fall first."

Okay, so I finished the first book a bit ago and loved it. Wedged in the book of short stories set between these two books after that and liked it well enough. Now I've read the second book (and considering it came out in 2012 with nothing else forthcoming, I suspect the last), and I'm really glad to have fit this whole series in this year! Desert fantasy has become my jam.

Dabir and Asim are still in 8th Century Mosul, but this time in the middle of a horrific winter. This time a band of ancient enemies is after a set of magical bone weapons, intent on opening a portal and unleashing damaging magic on the land. Our heroes have to stay just ahead of the enemies to get the weapons first, while also figuring out which of these ancient enemies are....actually enemies.

So, I'm gonna be clear here and say, while I enjoyed this book enough to rate it 5 stars, I think I enjoyed the first book in this series a bit more. I can't really put my finger on why, part of me wants to say that Dabir and Asim felt more like Sherlock and Watson in the first one than they did in this one. There's still plenty of adventure in both, but the first book felt less brakeneck-paced and a bit more thoughtful. It also takes something away from the feeling of desert fantasy when you're actually in snow and ice. Still, there's lots to like in this book as well, and I greatly enjoyed my adventure with these two. There's plenty of the same back-and-forth humor between them, plenty of adventure, ruins to delve, magical beasts to fight, and a satisfying conclusion left open-ended enough to house a future story (if I thought one was forthcoming).

Highly recommend both books by this author.

"Those who have baffled and spoiled this expedition ought not to escape."

This book was like a two-for-one special for me. Not only was it an arctic expedition book, which I automatically love, it comes with a bonus murder mystery for some added drama. The book opens with a group exhuming Captain Hall's grave for further study about the mystery, so you know up front that things don't go well for at least one of them, but how did he die? Two sides of the story exist, either he got sick after coming back from a cold expedition and drank hot coffee and died of apoplexy (the doctor's diagnosis), or something else was afoot.

Meanwhile, the rest of the expedition goes to pot fairly quickly after Captain Hall's death. Command fell to Sidney Budington, who (allegedly) couldn't find his way out of a bottle long enough to be a proper commander. Stores were burned through at an alarming rate as they were icebound, and the one attempt a group of people made at reaching the north pole via sled while bound led to Budington leaving them behind. The rest of the book is from the perspective of this group of stranded people and what it took to survive until their eventual rescue.

We also get a substantial amount of book after the rescue, covering the inquiry into What Really Happened, where we get one side (Tyson's, stuck on the ice), the other side (Budington, ran the ship aground, it sunk), and the doctor's side (with Budington, quinine is fine ok). The back and forth and finger pointing was amusing. The epilogue of the book covers what was uncovered by studying the samples from Captain Hall's corpse using modern medicine.

Just a really interesting book. I loved that just enough time was spent in the beginning setting things up without getting bogged down in expedition preparation minutiae. There was enough points of view in the beginning at least before things went south (err...north?) to already see how doomed the expedition was based on personnel conflicts alone. After being marooned, we narrow down to one point of view (Tyson's), and we see him struggle to keep their band together and moving in the right direction despite having zero authority and zero motivational tools. Loved the inclusion of the Where Are They Now after the investigation.

I hope you like trains, because boy do trains feature heavily in this mystery. Holy cow was I bored reading this book. Zero character development, a tell, not show way of writing, and not a very compelling mystery led me to almost putting this down many times. It was short, I guess was my saving grace?

Two people are found dead on a beach, where authorities automatically assume, because of the presence of cyanide, that they were in love and killed themselves together. The man was involved in a government scandal, and the assumption was that the disgrace led the two to do the deed together. But the clues don't add up for one Tokyo detective, and we're treated to an extended "how did this suspect do it within this window of opportunity" sequence.

Rather than a methodical investigation involving clues and logic, it felt like the detective rather lucked his way into making correct guesses. Most of his detective work happens at a coffee shop, where he stares at a wall, puts facts together haphazardly in his head until the time periods line up, and then, BAM, he's right. Case closed.

Also, as mentioned, I hope you love trains. And train timetables. And extensive discussion about train stations. Train lines. Whether someone can catch a plane and a train in time. I guess this makes sense in a culture so reliant on rail travel, but man did it feel tedious.

Just....not my jam, I don't think. I wasn't on board with the solution, or the process, or basically any of it.

"The Season will always return."

This one picks up immediately where book 1 left off, with Essun & Company firmly entrenched at Castrima. We get the added POV of Essun's daughter, Nassun, as she travels with her father to a comm in the far north where her father thinks she can be 'cured' of her orogeny. The exact opposite happens, though, with Nassun learning more and more about how to use her orogeny from its residents--Schaffa, Essun's old guardian. Essun herself finds herself drawn into defending Castrima from raiders, as well as trying to master her own orogeny under ailing Alabaster's teaching.

While this book remains just as good as the first, in my opinion, it kind of felt like Nassun's development, both in orogeny and as a character, was rushed so she could be of service to the overall plot as soon as possible. We also start to learn more about what powers orogeny under the hood, so to speak, but it felt like more of that silver "magic" was handwaved away than what I would expect from the first book's care it took in explaining orogeny. Maybe more of this will be addressed in the third book.

Still, really enjoyed this book, another 5 star read for me this year!

Something just never clicked with me while reading this book. I've read a lot of mythological retellings (a mixed bag of a genre, to be sure), even ones from villain perspectives, and this one just felt....off, to me.

Kaikeyi grew up as a princess in the kingdom of Kekaya with many brothers, a distant father, and a mother who leaves them when she was very young. She discovers a scroll that grants her magical powers to see bonds between her and those around her, and affect those bonds. Her upbringing was more martial lessons from her twin brother than anything feminine, so when the day comes that she is promised as a third wife to Dashrath from a neighboring kingdom, it comes as a shock and a betrayal. She goes, reluctantly, but not before exacting a promise from Dashrath--if she bears him a son, he will become the heir to the throne and not the son of his first wife. Between this promise and her powers in the Binding Plane, it sets her down a path of hardship, misery, and betrayal, all for the love of her sons and her kingdoms.

I'm gonna be up front right here and say I don't know the source material hardly at all. I know of Rama, and have some basic facts in my head about his importance, but not much else. For other people like me, or people who may be going in blind, the story is a mostly enjoyable one about balancing priorities and the lengths one goes through for the ones they love. But for other people, the ones who are well versed in the source material, who know the actual figures these characters are based on, this will be a very unsatisfying read.

Personally, I thought this was just okay. The pacing is a little slow in the middle, but I did enjoy the beginning and watching Kaikeyi grow into her powers, forge strong bonds with her brothers, and enjoying her childhood. After she leaves to marry Dashrath, however, things started feeling slow and repetitive. The same points are belabored constantly, and the inevitable betrayal foreshadowed almost from the beginning. The writing is phenomenal though! The author is really great at emotional writing, drawing out feelings from the reader, and setting a stage.

My real big sticking point (and the one I have for several other mythological retellings from a villain perspective) is the depiction of Kaikeyi as being Absolutely Perfect, and everyone around her as being evil, misguided, wrong, etc. It was hard to overlook the depiction of Rama in this book, knowing even the little bit I know about him, in favor of Kaikeyi instead. The magic the author introduces is the crutch the book relies on to smooth out all the inconsistencies and cognitive dissonance between the actual figures and the book characters, and I sort of hate when handwavy magic is relied on to tell a story.

This isn't a bad book, just not one that clicked with me, I guess is my summary.

I wanted to love this book, I tried so hard to love this book, especially for all the food for thought it introduces, but I think ultimately all the things it tries to tackle was its downfall.

Sara is an unwilling detainee at a retention center (not a prison, allegedly) for being at risk for harming someone else. She was picked up at the airport coming back from a conference, and told that her Risk Assessment score, computed by algorithms and AI profiling, was too high. She'd be released from the retention center after 21 days of observation. Months pass. Nobody can tell Sara why she's still being retained, and her (understandable) behavior in the facility puts her further back with each imagined/exaggerated infraction. Lawyers tell her to just obey her captors and she'll be released once her score goes down, but how do you manage that when your captors can say whatever they want about your behavior? And what do you do when your "score" is tied to your very dreams you can't control?

I loved the ideas introduced in this book about surveillance states, the role of AI in profiling, going all Minority Report on "potential" threats, the prison system corollaries you can draw here, racial issues, etc, but I think all these great ideas end up working against each other. These are all valid and legitimate worries/issues, but when they're all thrown in the same (not very long) book, some of the impact is lost and they all end up fighting for your emotional bandwidth at once.

I also didn't feel like the characters here were real people experiencing the prison system, just stand-ins experiencing all the bad things the system throws at them until the end of the book happens. Sara and her husband never felt like husband and wife, Sara's fellow inmates didn't have a lot of backstory, and nobody had any real agency. Which, fair, prison, but doesn't make for very interesting reading.

(mid book spoilers here) And what was up with that random chapter from the POV of that dream company plant in the middle of the book? I thought it was working up towards something more cohesive/sinister, but we only got that one chapter from her POV and then nothing else. With every other chapter being from Sara's POV, it just felt really jarring and unnecessary.

This had the makings of a book I'd really enjoy, but it ended up feeling more like a less interesting Minority Report, to pull a comparison from another review.

Soooooooo...... I grabbed this book off NetGalley because it's a book about magical libraries. I've read a ton of these, and I like the different takes. I have not read anything by Kate Quinn previously (I guess she writes historical romances?), so understand going into this review that maybe I don't have the same background and history with this author that others do.

Alix is down on her luck, down to $36 in her account, and even that is taken from her when her identity is stolen and her bank account yanked from her. She stops by the Boston Public Library where she works part time as a page to see if there's any extra work for her, and when she was told no, she beats feet to the stacks to avoid crying in front of coworkers. Throwing open a storage room door she steps, not into the storage room she expects, but into a vast magical library. Enter the Astral Library, open for people in need of refuge. Here, the Librarian matches wayward travelers with books, where they can live out their lives in their favorite book worlds not as the main characters, but as background characters living in the world. This sounds like heaven to Alix, but in her delay in picking the right book world for her to hide in, she gets caught up in Astral Library business involving mysterious red cards, invaders attempting to pull established patrons out of their books, and a group bent on tearing down the very foundation of the Astral Library.

Right off the bat, I will say I love the idea of a library harboring people who really need it. That's true to life, and something all libraries should aspire to being. But unfortunately, the rest of the book felt like a fever dream. All the extras piled on top of the book refugee idea really brought the entire thing down, especially when none of it seemed to add to the overall plot.

I also kind of didn't like the writing. It's chock full of over-the-top humor ("Let me be your Watson and let's 'Study in Scarlet' this bitch.") and gags that I feel like are all over the contemporary romance genre these days. The author also manages to work in a "LOL" and a fourth wall-breaking reference to herself. There also manages to be a (late story relationship spoilers here) third act breakup, without there being an actual romance in place. It just all felt like Too Much, and not what I wanted to read from a book about a magical library.

Maybe Kate Quinn fans will get more out of it than I did? Great premise, I just didn't care for the presentation.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a free e-copy in exchange for an honest review.

A hot guy dupes three different girls in three different states into dinner, drinks, and a roofie. You can see where this is going. The girls are murdered, but instead of that being the end of the story, the three girls each end up in an undead limbo, able to see the world around them but unable to interact (for the most part). They're able to follow their murderer around, see his home life, and how their families are coping with their disappearances. As the murderer hops states and kills again, the three girls end up coming together and trying to see this guy brought to justice.

I want to say up front that I really liked this concept of the ghosts of his victims following him around and vaguely annoying him with their limited powers. It's a unique POV, where we get to see the murderer living his life and also the investigations going on at the same time. What I'm less sold on, though, was the girls themselves. All three read very similarly and had vaguely generic names, so it was hard to keep them straight, particularly when all three are brought together near the end. And while I really don't know the extent of ghost powers, whatever they can do to interact with the world seems to conveniently get more powerful exactly when it needs to without a lot of handwavy explanation.

But it was really a sad story for the three girls. I really did enjoy the story, even if I didn't like how similar the three girls felt. If you like the whole "I am a ghost" POV, I read a book earlier this year that I really enjoyed along those same lines. Check out In an Instant by Suzanne Redfearne.

"Piano keys. The ivory spine of the Arctic."

Because I read so many Arctic expedition books, I'm uniquely interested in any book that references this area of the world. So imagine my surprise when I was halfheartedly browsing NetGalley and found a fiction book about a homesteading family in the Arctic making a living by selling piano parts, a quirky concept right my my wheelhouse. I wasn't quite sure what I was getting into, especially since generational family dramas aren't usually my cup of tea, but I came away from this book incredibly impressed with what I read.

The Spahr family has been homesteading off the grid in the Arctic since their ancestor, Moose, was dragged there reluctantly by his father wanting a better (read: more independent) life for them. At the time, cheap, productive land was promised to anyone willing to make the journey to claim it--provided you're willing to lug an upright piano along. The thinking was a piano meant civility, creativity, a mark of worth, so any family wanting to make this journey to create what was envisioned as an artistic community of like-minded people needed to purchase one and bring it along. So part of this book covers Moose, his family, and the others in their caravan north, and his trials along the way. The other part of this book centers around Milda, Finlay, Temperance, and their parents, descendants of Moose, scratching out a living from Jubilation House, their shelter in the Arctic. While they make a meagre living from what they harvest (octopus, kelp, various plants), What really sets their family on its fateful trajectory is the discovery of a discarded piano. The bulk of this book covers the various family members and how they approach this new industry of the Arctic, the reclamation of piano parts.

I'm gonna save you a Google, because the concept of the book was just plausible enough to make me wonder if the lugging of a piano to the Arctic was an actual thing in history. It is not, as best I can tell.

I don't normally get fully into generational dramas, but something about the Spahr family really had me interested to see how the family ended up. This story is told through chapters involving Moose (the Spahrs' ancestor), and then chapters involving various POVs from the Spahrs and (later) other families that survived. Moose's story is told fragmentally, so you don't get his conclusion until the end of the book, but I appreciated seeing various "clues" along the way from later on.

I got really invested in Milda and Finlay specifically, because (mild character motivations here) Milda never seemed to really enjoy her time at Jubilation house, yet stuck around out of a sense of familial obligation it seemed. I simultaneously wanted her to follow her dreams and leave, and also also wanted the family to stick together. Finlay was all-in on Arctic life though, and I felt like Milda stuck around to make sure he was safe. I liked Moose's POV as well, as we get to know the various families that play a part later in the book. I felt really bad for him, swept up as he was by a father who thought he knew best. I wasn't quite as in love with the later POVs, they felt not quite as established as the Spahrs, but I appreciated that they carried the story along to its end and had a purpose.

Really enjoyed this book. Tugs at the heartstrings something terrible as it goes along (MAJOR PLOT SPOILER: Finlay's death gutted me in particular), well written, just a unique story I wasn't sure what to expect going in.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me a free eBook in exchange for an honest review.

I grew up in Michigan around hunters and fishermen, and was aware that different fish are attracted to different lures. Tackle boxes are full of pretty colors. What I was not aware of was that, a) apparently fly lures used to be tied using incredibly exotic feathers because of some woo-woo science that said fish care about that sort of thing, and b) that there's an entire hobby community built around tying these flies, and who don't actually use them at all. The world truly is a diverse place.

Enter Edwin Rist, flutist and fly tyer (a word I promise is spelled correctly because I looked it up) from a young age. He earned a name within the fly tying community, became incredibly obsessed with this little segment of his world, and....robbed a museum of most of its rare bird collection, almost 300 in total. Rather than actually using them in his hobby, he ended up selling them both piecemeal and as whole birds, making a ton of money, and eventually getting caught. The author here tells Edwin Rist's story after hearing about this crazy crime, and then takes things a step further by trying to track down the missing birds.

You can't get much more niche than a true crime book involving exotic feathers and an unknown hobbyist community. No people were harmed in this book (but a heck of a lot of bird carcasses are denuded), so if you're looking for a great true crime book not about murder, this may be your jam. I was really into this book about Edwin Rist and the fallout from his crime. I won't spoil anything here, but there's quite an interesting twist as the book progresses beyond the trial, something I wasn't expecting in a true crime book where I'm more used to the story being played straight by the author.

Really interesting book, fits snugly into my 5 star favorite books on incredibly niche topics.

For a book involving Tiffany glass, I expected a bit more description and inclusion of the actual glass than what I got. Something that artistic and colorful felt like it needed more than a few cursory lines in a book that I ultimately was disappointed in.

Emilie Pascal flees to America, running from a past in France where her father is accused of art forgery. Determined to get a job designing Tiffany glass works, she produces a (forged) letter of recommendation and a portfolio (real) and manages to land the job of her dreams. There on the floor of the all female division of Tiffany's, Emilie creates art according to Mr. Tiffany's exacting standards, ultimately creating a four panel work depicting the four seasons that ultimately brings her back to Paris and back into the world she fled.

I went into this book expecting more historical fiction about the glass work and conditions and design process than I ended up getting. Aside from Emilie, we're also introduced to other characters in the book, but aside from Grace, Emilie's roommate, the others didn't really feel We also get other stories from the other girls here too, but other than Grace, Emilie's roommate, the others felt tacked on and not very well fleshed out. There's also a lot of romance and girls pairing off with guys that are brought into the story at convenient points, which seemed at odds with the "men are the problem" tone the author sets along the way.

Not the best historical fiction book I've read, I think we needed either fewer, more fleshed out characters, or an overall plot to follow all the way through to keep my interest up.

"The sea is broad and her paths are many."

I read Sancton's other book, Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica's Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night, as part of my deep dive into arctic exploration, and was really pleased with the result. I somehow missed(!) that he has another book coming next month (and will absolutely pick it up soon), but did manage to snag the ARC for this upcoming book of his. I went into it basically blind; I didn't know much about either the San Jose or treasure hunting in general, but I ended up walking away with more treasure hunter knowledge, historical and naval knowledge, and information about the players involved than I expected.

This book covers a lot of ground in its journey to the San Jose. The opening few chapters recounting how and why it sunk in the first place set the stage for later on, but also were interesting in their own right. I thought the different accounts for the lead up to and the actual battle of was a nice touch; you get to experience multiple angles of the incident. After this introduction of sorts, we're thrust into the role of Dooley-watcher, where we're introduced to him first later in life and then from childhood on up in Cuba. I sort of thought the Dooley life chapters were a mixed bag; some were really interesting, and sort of shows how and why Dooley made the choices he made later on, and some felt a bit extraneous and made things feel a bit slow. The treasure hunter asides were universally interesting to me, as was the actual search for the San Jose later on. Lots of neat footnotes are included here, particularly about the preponderance of shells around the wreck site and the connection between them and bones. Nature is metal.

I will say that I sort of expected a bit more about the wreck itself. It felt like by the time it was located, the book was basically over. With what happens later, I guess that's to be expected, but it felt a bit anticlimactic given the title of the book. But as a book about treasure hunting vs. deep sea archaeology, I was very pleased.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for a free e-copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

"Here at the beginning, it must be said the End was on everyone's mind."

Rainey is a guitar player holed up in a small town surviving after climate change works its terrible magic on the world. Society has collapsed, but small towns like Rainey's survive through helping each other and forming close social ties. A visitor drops in on Rainey and Lark's house to rent their upstairs room, and it's through this roommate that the story really gets started. The roommate vanishes unexpectedly, but someone comes looking for him and ruins Rainey's life along the way. Rainey uses his boat to escape, and we're brought along his tour of Lake Superior and his musings along the way.

Not quite what I expected, but not unwelcome either. Things seem a bit confused in places, if only because there's a few world-specific terms used as if we should be aware of what they mean, but never really are. This was a surprisingly beautiful book about life in the End Times as they impacted an average man, though. Things start out oddly hopeful, get progressively bleaker as the book goes on, and still manages to wrap all the way back around to hopeful by the end. Things never went quite as I expected at any point in the book, which added a bit to my enjoyment.

The book does meander quite a bit, so if the musings of a sad guitar player about the world around him don't interest you, you probably won't like this one. I did feel like the book was slow in places, but ultimately enjoyed how things played out.

I'm apologetic and sad that it took me this long to read this book.

I won't summarize the plot here, because it's a very hard book to summarize convincingly. In brief and using not-book-specific terms, earth mages (sort of) are the crux of an empire about to fall. We get three narrators of this falling, and three different points in time telling the story. Nothing is quite as it seems up front.

It's dense to start, but I didn't find it unreasonably so. I thought the author does a really good job of onboarding the patient reader; if you give the story a chance to unfold and hold your questions for the end, you'll be rewarded along the way. The magic system is incredibly unique, and the author does a good job of explaining it and layering on complexity as the story goes along using the plot. This book is a journey in all senses of the word, and I never really found myself bored, even during the middle part that receives mixed reviews. Several moments in the story drew an audible noise from me, both in realization and in shock. The use of the different narrators was especially fun (if you can use fun to describe this bleak book), in that it kept me wondering how things tied together.

Just a really great complex, interesting, engaging, (insert additional awesome adjectives here) book. Can't wait to start book 2.