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Certainly different than what I was expecting from the title/description. Not in a bad way, I don't think, but anyone picking this up and expecting a djinn in the story may be disappointed at how historical fiction-y it is.

A great mansion sits on the coast of South Africa. Sana and her father are tenants in this mansion, currently subdivided awkwardly into different apartments and occupied by a colorful cast of characters. We get to know these neighbors well, as Sana gets used to her new surroundings and starts exploring the unused parts of the mansion. The East Wing is where she finds discarded furniture, a locked door, and a mystery to unravel about the history of the house surrounding Meena. Meena was a lover and second wife of the previous owner of the house, and we're introduced to her tragic story, and the story of the house, through Sana's investigations.

Right off the bat, there is a djinn in this book, but the djinn is just a...idk...unseen being witnessing what's going on with Sana and Meena. We don't get the djinn as a viewpoint exactly, and neither Sana nor Meena ever know it's there, but we get its impressions, and those of the house, occasionally. It's unique, the djinn is clearly upset by what has happened and what is happening, but can't do anything about it. The book itself is more of a family drama or historical fiction than it is a fantasy/magical realism book.

I thought Sana's viewpoint in present day South Africa wasn't quite as compelling as Meena's, but we needed Sana's sleuthing to understand Meena's story and its ramifications. Sana's neighbors are all a bit crazy in their own way, and we get to know them too alongside the story of the house. Meena's story is tragic (but kind of predictable), but anyone looking for justice in what happens to her may not enjoy the ending. But maybe that was sort of the point.

I did love the writing of this book, it was very lyrical, very compelling, very descriptive. I wanted to keep reading to figure out the story of the house and its inhabitants. Just, in short, an unexpectedly enjoyable historical fiction, despite the lack of a djinn.

Good but not great/5 stars. I'm a huge fan of the microhistory genre, and I felt like this particular take on the history of the American road trip was way too broad/meandering. I loved the bits about the actual road trip, the history of, what things sprung up alongside the roads as a result of what changes, those parts were really interesting. I also learned Betty Ford was a CB user, who used the handle 'First Mama". Kinda love that.

What didn't work for me as much were the other tangents, the ones only peripherally related to road trips. For instance, while I enjoy video games and arcades, the history of arcade cabinets in hotels was kind of out of place. There's several rabbit holes that, while interesting in their own right, don't seem to quite fit here. Another thing that you will either like or not is that the author uses his own experiences as a kid on road trips with his family as segues into the various topics. While the (sometimes lengthy) anecdotes are funny, it sort of lent this microhistory a bit of a memoir feel, when all I wanted was to get back to the history topics.

So, again, good but not great. Nice little audiobook, but I probably won't revisit it.

"I'm just reminding you that you can’t base a character on a real-life person and then not get sued."

Final tally:

Instances of the word 'snarl': 15

Instances of the words 'grump' or 'grumpy': 27

Instances of the word 'growl': 26

Instances of the word 'scowl': 13

For a book this size, north of 500 pages, I fully expected way more to happen. And not even just in the romance sense, just in the overall "is there a story here somewhere in this book with story in the title" sense. I fully admit I don’t normally read romance, but even my basic story need didn't feel met by this one.

Hazel is a writer. Or, was a writer. Or maybe still is in her mind, but hasn't really put anything out since her divorce, so she isn't actually in the minds of everyone who counts. Her friend and agent Zoey delivers an ultimatum – produce a book or get dropped. She ditches big city life for small town life in the hopes of finally finding inspiration, and she does…..in the form of tall, grumpy contractor hired to renovate her decrepit house. A whole town's worth of over-the-top personalities and chaotic shenanigans happens, with the overall goal being to save their small town from being absorbed by the larger city nearby. And of course, quirky sunshine writer and grumpy scowly contractor hook up.

This book was messy and chaotic, and not in a good way. I freely admit I haven't read any of the author's other books, but from reading reviews here, the chaos is even a bit much for long time author fans. The pages drip humor, and while it was fun in the beginning, it got really old really fast when the author is cracking jokes mid-sex, both out loud and in narration. Speaking of the actual reason we’re all here reading this book, it took the two characters half the book (that's roughly 250 pages) for them to go on their first date, and that wasn’t even a date. For some more detailed information, (romance spoilers here) Cam agrees to a FWB situation with Hazel for research purposes, so for a large chunk of the book even past this point they still aren't really a couple. Lots of sex is had, of course, but there's zero relationship development or chemistry. Even the overall story propping up the romance feels lacking. I guess I expected more to happen in a book of this size.

Finally, with Hazel being a writer herself, there's multiple points of the book where it feels like the author is speaking directly to the reader, and all of it felt shoehorned in. Lots of statements about how Hazel feels like her writing is discounted because she writes romance and not literary fiction, some of what feels like insider baseball about how the publishing industry and writer events works, and even a whole chapter dedicated to Hazel giving another character pointers on how to get started writing. None of it felt like it helped the overall story along any.

Just not my thing, I guess.

"Vendi, Vidi, Solvi."

Clayton Stumper is a puzzle unto himself -- as a baby, he was left on the doorstep of the Fellowship of Puzzlemakers in a hat box with no note. Growing up with the house full of various puzzlers across many different disciplines left an impression on him, but as a young adult now, he wants to learn more about where he came from. Pippa, the woman who found him, knows, but all she left him after her death was a puzzle to solve. Never much of a puzzler, he nevertheless sets off to learn more about his parents, and himself in the process.

Right off the bat, we needed more Clayton in this story about Clayton. Interspersed with the chapters about this mystery surrounding his parents, we also have the past POV of Pippa, founding the Fellowship and bringing together all the disparate personalities that made the group what it was. Not a lot happens after the founding of the Fellowship though, making it feel more like a distraction from the actual plot with Clayton that matters than anything else.

I also wish Clayton was developed a bit more than he was. He seems like a nice guy, but really unable to adult on his own without Pippa or the Fellowship there to guide him along. Towards the end, he seems more willing to talk to people than he was, but that's really all the character development we get out of him.

I will say, in my physical copy at least, the inclusion of puzzles to actually solve was a nice touch.

I've never had the thought while reading a book that it was too well-researched, but I think that's why I didn't enjoy this one as much as other people did. It's clear the author did a ton of research for this book, but the amount of stuff shoehorned in made the flow feel clunky.

Yunxian (Lady Tan) studied illnesses, midwifery, and general female illnesses under her grandparents while growing up. There, she also met her lifelong friend Meiling, who was studying to be a midwife. They grow up together, learn together, and become inseparable, until Yunxian is sent away to a new household for her arranged marriage. Her new mother-in-law isn't exactly cruel, but she does forbid Yunxian from continuing to practice medicine on the women of the household, as well as from seeing Meiling. Yunxian struggles to find her place in this household, and has to figure out how to balance the wishes of her new family with her desire to practice medicine.

The author, through Yunxian, goes into minute detail about the various medical cases Yunxian experiences, making the overall story stall while the author explains some other obscure Chinese medical treatment. I also didn't really care for how unnatural the phrasing feels for some words, like 'child palace' for womb. It feels like maybe the Chinese was translated literally for some things and not others? It just felt off, to me.

The plot itself is a bit lacking as well. Most of the writing is spent on describing Chinese medicine, and the actual plot suffers periodically because of it. When the plot actually advances, it feels rushed, like the author wants to get right back into describing Chinese medicine but recognizes that a story has to exist somewhere. Many of the side characters within Lady Tan's circle felt weirdly flat as well, with the most egregious cases being her daughters. She talks a lot about how much she loves her daughters, but they barely exist in the pages.

So while the writing is actually pretty great (as Lisa See's books tend to be), I thought this one was kind of a miss for me.

"Broken are the roots of chaos."

In this novella (which, let's be honest, is about the size of a regular novel from anyone else), we're two years prior to the events of Priory of the Orange Tree, and focused almost squarely on Marosa, queen of Yscalin. Carscaro is a city built on fire, with lava flowing in canals and Mount Fruma behind them. Inside this mountain is where Fýredel has been sleeping for 500 years. Unfortunately, this is the year when Fýredel stirs, putting all of Carscaro in danger. Later in the book, we also follow Aubrecht, the high prince of Mentedon and betrothed to Marosa, as he struggles to discover the fate of his fiancee in the wake of Fýredel's awakening. Finally, rounding out the cast of POVs, we have Melaugo, a culler of sleepers (beasts turned into half wyrms and then put to sleep), who, together with her lover, have to find their way out of a nation under siege.

The author bills this as a companion book to Priory of the Orange Tree, and I agree with that. While this can be read on its own, I think if you want any sort of closure or continuance on events, you need to read Priory of the Orange Tree to get it. But I do think this highlights the fact that not only can the author write giant 1000+ page epics, she can also write shorter bites of her world's larger history for fans too.

I loved Marosa's viewpoint best of the ones presented here. She carries herself well in the face of everything crumbling around her, and the ending (such as it is, presented here) had me feeling all sorts of things for her. If you've already read Priory of the Orange Tree you already have an idea of what's to come here, but it still manages to catch me by surprise. Aubrecht's viewpoint, too, really hit me in the feels, as he struggles to figure out what to do personally and publicly after Fýredel awakens. The third viewpoint, Melaugo, was interesting, but felt a bit removed from the other two. The author uses her as a window into how events impact the common folk of Yscalin, but it never actually intersects at all with either Marosa or Aubrecht at this point so it just felt a little tacked on.

There is a romance here, because it is Samantha Shannon, but the romance is already established before the book starts, so there's no development or anything beyond some ex- drama that needs resolving.

I did absolutely enjoy this book though, and look forward to more "short" stories in this Roots of Chaos series she's squeezing in amongst her main books.

Man, I do love me a good character driven story that makes me feel things.

So Newton is an alien, sent to Earth to save his race. He arrives, immediately blends in, and starts laying the groundwork for an epic undertaking to send a ship to his planet and save the rest of them. Only, somewhere along the way, while pretending to be human, the lines blur. And while Newton tries to keep his alien eyes on his goal, even the best men, alien and human alike, can fall.

I really found the idea of a representative from a super advanced alien race falling victim to very human vices both compelling and sad. To be up front, not a lot happens in this book at all. There's criticisms here about all Newton doing is drinking and making money, and all of that is very true, but it's also the point of the story. The writing is sparse but compelling, and I really felt drawn into this story of Newton's rise and fall. The ending, especially, had me feeling things I wasn't expecting when going into a classic sci-fi book.

Just a really good read that will stick with me, I think. There's apparently a movie out there that I plan on watching when I get the chance.

A cozy mystery set in spaaaaaaaaaaaace. Georgia is the ship's detective in retirement, her memories shelved in the ship's library with everyone else's memories, ready to be uploaded into a new body when called for. But when the ship brings her back, rather than putting her memories into a brand new body just for her, her memories are placed within someone else's body as an emergency protocol after her memory book is destroyed. A shelf of memory books destroyed, a body found drowned in a bathtub, and Georgia herself with the sneaking suspicion she's just been sleeved into the killer's body.

This is a novella, so while all of these ideas sound good in theory, the book just doesn't have enough runway to pull any of it off. Dorothy never really struggles to solve anything, and just bounces from plot conversation to plot conversation until she reaches a conclusion and the mystery is solved. The crime itself is (ending spoilers here) a bit too white collar/pedestrian for my taste, given the setting, making it overall kind of...boring?

Also, for something that's only 100 pages, we do spin our wheels in the knitting shop a bit overlong.

Three stories about three people who run into the magical Full Moon Coffee Shop right when they need it most in their lives. The shop is run by bipedal cats who serve them food and drinks intended to help them work through their problems, and also reading their star charts along the way.

Right off the bat, I'll say there's a TON of astrological talk, so much so that this book felt less about the (flat) characters and more about fitting in discussion about Mercury in retrograde or whatever. The three characters all have some tangential relationship to one another, but their stories by and large never overlap, making things feel a bit choppy and segmented. There's an epilogue of sorts at the end to show you how things end up with each character which was nice, but by and large I wasn't very invested in their stories along the way.

I did enjoy the vibe of the coffee shop itself, but the shallow characters and weak plot(s) made this a miss for me.

"The world is full of ways and means to waste time."

I didn't enjoy this one as much as I enjoyed A Wild Sheep Chase unfortunately. It felt like there was less of a plot in this one, and Murakami laid on the magical realism really thickly. I'm not even sure I really understood most of the themes by the end. As such, this one felt more like A Day in the Life of a Protagonist than anything else, where he drinks a lot, pines after a receptionist while also looking for his girlfriend(?), ogles a 14 year old girl for an uncomfortably long period of the book, and deals with a flaky former classmate with a surprising amount of tolerance. There's only the thinnest amount of plot threads snaking through this one, and Murakami's writing wasn't enough to keep me interested in what was going on all of the time.

As far as I'm concerned (and maybe I'm blaspheming here), you don't need to have read either of the first two books in this series to read either A Wild Sheep Chase or this one. Even AWSC could theoretically be skipped without missing too much of what's going on in this one, as beyond the repeated location of the Dolphin Hotel and one scene with the Sheep Man, there's not a lot of overlap. Maybe I would see more overlap if I were better at seeing complex themes and such, but whatever.

I'm glad to have read it, but it's very clearly one of Murakami's earliest books.

"This all has got to be, patently, the most unbelievable, the most ridiculous story I have ever heard."

Well, not my least favorite Murakami book to date (that'd be 1Q84). Started slow and puzzlingly, but managed to pull me in by the halfway point.

Our protagonist (from the first two Rat books) has a bit of a business problem. When designing a travel brochure, he unthinkingly uses the image his friend Rat sent him months previous of an idyllic hillside, mountain in the background, and sheep scattered on the grass. A mysterious man contacts him to demand he locate one of the sheep in the photo, a special sheep with a star on its back. What follows is a weird romp in rural Japan involving a sheep professor, a girl with unblocked, exquisite ears, and a guy in a skinsuit/sheep costume.

Yeah, typical Murakami, right?

I won't begin to summarize the themes of this book, because it's very literary and I'm pretty sure a large chunk went over my head. I enjoyed the fever dream of tracking down the sheep though, and thought this was a great follow on to the previous two books in this series. It really shows how far Murakami had come as a writer by the time he got to this book. It's very trippy, and really only for people who know what they're getting into with Murakami.

"I can be civil, ma'am, or I can be honest. You can't have both in their entirety."

This book had all the subtlety of a hammer to the face. While not a bad book exactly, there's the bones of some really good ideas here, I think the author fell into the trap of trying to tackle too many ideas in too few pages, and didn't do any of them any justice.

Sciona is the first female high mage in Tiran and has something to prove to her male counterparts. On her first day, through some juvenile bullying from her equals, she's saddled with a janitor, a Kwen named Tommy (or, more correctly, Thomil) as her assistant. Kwen are seen as being lesser than everyone else as they come from outside Tiran and are assumed to be lazy, dangerous, cannibalistic, stupid, and a whole host of other unpleasant things. Rather than sending him away, Sciona makes Thomil her assistant, and together they set about her project of expanding Tiran's magical net that sustains the city. But as they look more closely into the magic's inner workings, they both realize the horrible truth behind everything that has been covered up the entire time.

I thought the basic ideas of this book were actually pretty good, if handled clumsily. I liked the idea of the magic system, and liked the incorporation of some moral ideas around classism and racism in keeping a city like Tiran running. What I didn't like was that the author tried to do too much, cram too many social injustices in, making everything feel muddled by the end. Sciona has strong feelings about a women's lot in life, and while I agree with the feminist sentiments she has in large part, I don't like the author's tendency to make every guy in the book an idiot, a sociopath, a rapist, a drunk, or otherwise bring down the entire male gender to make Sciona look better than the rest.

The entire first 30% of the book or so is nothing but infodumping of this carefully crafted magic system the author created, which made it a bit of a drag to get through. It's almost too fleshed out for a book, and many of the intricacies don't really matter for the ending to land. I didn't like the author's use of Thomil to be the infodump character; Sciona spends long chapters explaining magic to this "uneducated" Kwen in her midst, leaving the actual plot to hang. And by the end of the book, many of the plot points are rehashed so often that all of their impact has drained away by the time you get to the part of the book where it's supposed to matter.

I also didn't like Sciona as a character in general. She's unpleasant, just as racist/classist as her male counterparts, and even late in the book (ending spoilers here) doesn't seem like she really absorbs what Thomil's telling her and what she's seeing around her. She's written like she's supposed to come around on her beliefs about Kwen, but it feels so abrupt and insincere that I'm not sure I'm sold on it, particularly after some of the things she says to Thomil in anger. "Your people died because they deserved it" doesn't seem like something you should be able to easily come back from.

Just....overly complicated, entirely lacking in nuance and discussion, and really ham fisted in its execution in my opinion.

I sort of thought the "secret healing powers" would play a more prominent role in a book about, well, healers, but I was surprised at how little it actually had an impact on things.

We have two points of view in this story; Louise in present day, navigating a lifelong friendship-maybe-more with Peter, when a car accident brings Louise's latent healing powers to life. Now she's wondering from her mom and her grandmother why nobody told her, and what this means for herself, her future, and Peter going forward. We also have Helene in WWII France, Louise's great-grandmother, also navigating the complexities of her healing powers as they conflict with the religious school she attends. When a battle brings her to the side of a wounded allied soldier, Helene has to decide where to draw the line when she learns that everything has a cost.

This is very much a women's fiction story with some magical realism elements. The healing aspect comes up frequently, but still manages to take a back seat to Louise's family drama and Helene's struggles within her religious school. Which, while fine, made this more of a fluffy read than I was expecting. I also thought that, despite the two POVs being from the same family, there was very little overlap, making this feel more like two separate stories than two halves of a whole.

There's some good discussions here about caregiving and end of life decisions, but because of the author's nursing background, it felt almost like the author was talking to the reader directly in parts, almost clinical. It was a little distracting to go from the flat writing about the characters to in-depth, clinical terms and concepts regarding healthcare and death.

The healing is also the worst-kept secret on the planet, because the insistence from the family to keep it a secret is at odds with the fact that it felt like everyone else around the main characters knew about it already. Ending spoilers here: I'm not sure why Louise lied to Peter so much during the story about her powers and what happened during the accident, when everyone in their small town basically knew about them anyway. What's one more person? It would have alleviated a lot of Louise's problems.

If you're looking for a general fiction book about family troubles, this may be your jam. If you read the synopsis and were intrigued by the healing powers, maybe give it a pass.

As I listened to this book, I kept hopping between 5 stars for the writing and 3 stars for the story. I ultimately decided that good writing doesn't save a disjointed story, but I wish I could have rated this one higher for the writing alone.

Alma Cruz is a writer of untold stories -- that is, despite being a writer of some renown, she still has bits of stories unfinished and unpublished that she feels compelled to put to rest. Rather than shove them in a shoebox and hide them in a closet, she constructs a literal graveyard for her finished stories on some inherited land in the Dominican Republic. She hires Filomena as her groundskeeper to maintain the land in her absences, and tells her to stop and listen to each story once a day. So, while keeping the grounds clear and maintaining the sculpted headstones, she starts pausing at one grave a day, and to her astonishment, she starts hearing these characters' stories. Not the incomplete snippets Alma wrote, but entire family stories involving intrigue, romance, infidelity, and death.

There's so many POVs in this book. Alma. Filomena. The characters from Alma's books (primarily Bienvenida and Manuel). Side characters sometimes get a chapter. We hop back and forth between characters in the present and in the past, making things feel very fragmented. There's a lot going on backstory-wise amongst everyone, but you really have to be good at keeping stories straight to stay oriented in this book. Despite all this, the prose is fantastic, and honestly was what kept me going throughout the book.

Great prose but too many POVs and too much to keep track of for me to rate much higher.

"We always sit at the plank."

This is like if my favorite author, Guy Gavriel Kay, wrote Game of Thrones without gratuitous sex scenes and almost all political intrigue. Which is to say, yes please, more of this for me.

Navola is run by its bankers. Davico, son of Devonaci, is coming of age as part of the di Regulai family, shrewd, powerful merchants who have pull everywhere. Devonaci is a master businessman, and Davico spends all his days growing up comparing himself to his father and coming up short. But time doesn't care if you're not ready, and Davico finds himself thrust more and more frequently into the types of political intrigue he hates. His adopted sister, Celia, however is steeped in intrigues, and finds herself more than capable of navigating the twisty Navola mind. When things come to a political boil, though, Davico's naiveness may be his and his family's downfall.

Right off the bat I'll say that this isn't a book for just anyone. It's like...literary fantasy? Not a whole lot happens immediately, or at all. Some action-adjacent things happen around the 50% mark, and then again for the last quarter of the book, but by and large this is a character-driven political fantasy seen through a vaguely Italian lens. That appealed to me, but probably won't to an average fantasy reader. Yes there is a dragon (or...a part of a dragon, I guess), but I wouldn't call it a central character. The last quarter of the book is brutal though, and made me experience a large enough mental WTF that I spent a chunk of my cruise holed up in my cabin finishing the book to find out what happens.

My only hangups really was the ending and how the author basically (major ending spoilers here) wrote Celia out of the book. Yes, she does put in an appearance, but I was rather put out at how quickly/easily Davico washed his hands of her betrayal. I feel like something of that magnitude needed longer to marinate. But even that wasn't a large enough of an issue for me to not enjoy things thoroughly.

Recommend this for fans of Guy Gavriel Kay, and political/character-heavy fantasy.

Hey, did you like Pachinko (more than me)? Are you keen on multigenerational Asian historical fiction? Like great writing? This one's for you, then.

Meilin is newly married in 1938, but with war headed their way her future is uncertain. With only her son Renshu, a beautiful hand painted scroll, and what little they can throw together, they're forced to flee an oncoming Japanese army. Renshu is raised on tales Meilin tells from the scroll, as together they make new lives for themselves over and over again as they're forced to flee again and again from places they try and start fresh in. As Meilin's story in Taiwan gives way to Renshu's story in America, and finally Renshu's daughter Lily trying to figure out who she is, we get to know this family's struggle, and how events of the past can shape a person in the future.

This one took me a bit to get into, but once I got into it (about when Meilin flees with Renshu the first time), it really sucked me in. The writing is exceptional, and really painted a picture of Meilin, her family, and what China looked like in her time. It's a multigenerational tale in the same way Pachinko is, but I thought this one was written a bit better and didn't overstay its welcome as much, so I enjoyed it more. I will say I think I was more invested in Meilin's story in the beginning, and Lily's story at the end, than I was with Renshu's story in the middle. Maybe his story would resonate with me more if I were more familiar with Chinese politics in America at the time, as it felt like I was missing context in the story for Renshu's paranoia. I really felt for Lily trying to figure out who she is, sandwiched between America and China and wanting to understand where she came from.

I really enjoyed this one though, despite my mild hangups with Renshu's point of view. Great writing and a sad story.

Yet another great premise, brought down by the author trying to do too much all at once.

Two points of view here: Tildy, librarian at a struggling archival library centered around historical figure Belva Curtis Lefarge in San Francisco, stumbles on a hidden room containing two intricate, beautiful dollhouses. In examining them, she discovers they both bear a monogram of their creator, and embarks on a quest to find out more about the mysterious 'CH'. We also have the past viewpoint of Cora Hale, newly arrived in Paris and on the run from what she left behind in America, she stays at a boarding house for artists and takes on clients in order to teach them how to paint and draw. The boarding house is owned by Belva Curtis Lefarge, who allows her to stay and also takes an interest in Cora's work. It's through Belva that Cora is introduced to her first set of miniatures, and from there she finds both her medium and her voice.

I thought the historical fiction story told through Cora's viewpoint was the more interesting of the two, but I thought it covered too much historical ground for me to really feel like I cared about what was going on. There's a mystery here about what the dollhouses are and why Tildy's mom is part of it, there's romance thrown in both Cora's and Tildy's viewpoints, there's historical fiction across two world wars and a meeting with Walt Disney, there's some tension thrown in about the fate of the archival library, there's just a lot going on here. Not helping things is that the characters -- literally all of them -- felt flat as cardboard. No real development happens, and by the end I just wanted to know what happened to the library more than I cared about Tildy throwing herself on her sword.

Idk, this book didn't do a whole lot for me. It's fine I guess, but I don't know if I'd recommend it strongly to anyone.

"Time goes by so damn fast."

As a small anecdote to tack on here for myself for later, I was reading my paperback copy of this book on my couch, and it's one of those duologies where you read half/one book and flip it over/around to read the other half/the other book. My husband walked past me perhaps two or three times before he finally asked if I was aware I was reading my book upside down.

These two are some of Murakami's earliest works, and it kind of shows. While the second book (Pinball, 1973) feels more like a cohesive book with some narrative direction, the first book (Hear the Wind Sing) just felt like scenes strung together until the book stopped having pages. Both feature the same two characters as main characters, Rat and our unnamed protagonist, just trying to make sense of the world in their early 20s, when things change, people move on, and they have to figure out what it means to be an adult. It's not quite angst these two are facing, but uncertainty about what to do with their lives beyond what they've always done (drink at J's bar, women, sit at the beach). Stagnation and moving on are common themes in Murakami's works, I've noticed. The second book has the only real magical realism here, and even that only comes in towards the last third of the book or so. It's not quite on par with some of his other books I enjoyed more, but I do like the idea of an advice-giving pinball machine.

I have the other books in this series at home, and I'm interested to see how more developed they are, since they're more full-fledged novels than these two were. Not bad books, but kind of forgettable.

"I guess the rich really are different. Most of us come from monkeys, but you're giving off a whiff of rattlesnake."

I read the first book in this series FOUR YEARS AGO. I meant to return to this series much sooner, but whoops, kind of forgot to. It's a shame, because this series really hits all my wants in a dark urban fantasy/paranormal book. Lots of humor, lots of mystery, lots of noir vibes, and a premise that sounds stereotypical but manages to not be.

In this go-around, Stark is back in LA, trying to make ends meet by working for the Golden Vigil. They don't much like working with him there, but he gets results, so they don't complain too much. When a job to take down a new vampire turns bloody fast, it launches Stark on a new path where he's trying to work both sides, heaven and hell, while not getting killed by either. Undead are the name of the game in this book, and Stark has to figure out who's behind a potential zombie disaster in the heart of LA before it's too late.

This book is basically more of the same of the first book, which was fine by me. There's still dark humor, still edge, still sarcasm aplenty, interspersed with Stark's musings on who the good guys really are when you're working for both angels and demons. The author is fantastic at infusing a lot of meaning, atmosphere, and edge into every line, despite the sentences being short and choppy. There's just flair everywhere, and I love it.

If you liked the first book, you'll like this one, I guess is what I'm trying to say.

There's some really great information packed into these 12 chapters. Each chapter discusses the transgressions of a different person/company that fits the theme, and the author (a journalist himself) does a great job at doing a deep dive on the subjects, with interviews aplenty. This book was the exact opposite of being dry; the author is phenomenal at grabbing your attention in each chapter and holding it until the very end when he caps things off with a short epilogue of sorts.

Because it's 12 different subjects in under 400 pages, expect to do a lot of ping-ponging in terms of subject matter. My favorite chapter, by far, was, surprisingly, the chapter on Trump, Mark Burnett, and how The Apprentice created a monster, but each chapter had something really interesting going on that kept me listening. The only potentially strange inclusion here was the very last chapter on Anthony Bourdain, because up to that point it had been by and large grifter/illegal activity discussed, but I guess he needed someone in the 'Rebel' category to complete the title collection.

Just a really interesting book, highly recommend for true crime/literary journalism fans. I'll definitely be checking out more from this author/journalist.

DNF @ 10%

Just a series of fake vignettes, supposedly stories out of some Cabinet 13 that someone watches over. I think the stories are supposed to be cultural satire, but I didn't really want to pick it apart. Just not my thing.

"It's possible that all these little moments that meant so much to me never meant quite the same thing to him."

This is me, trying very hard to keep an open mind, about a genre I don't normally read. I love that this genre exists for people, because I earnestly believe that there's a book out there for everyone, I just never connected well with romances in general. Maybe I'm too much of a realist.

I'll start with what I liked, because there are good things here for people who enjoy the genre. I loved the early days of Poppy/Alex's friendship, maybe because I can identify with that part. Just two awkward college students exploring a maybe friendship and being along for the ride as it slowly morphs into something more (in their heads). I thought that was done well, realistically, believably. I also did like how the author managed to build up some feelings about how things end up. I wasn't totally in love with the back-and-forth in time format of the story, but it did keep me reading to figure out A) what happened in Croatia (spoiler alert: not as much as I was expecting), and B) how they managed to resolve things.

Poppy started out endearing with how over-the-top she is in basically everything, but as the book went on, it started to become a bit much. I especially thought it was unnecessary after (late book spoilers)Alex and Poppy finally start being honest with each other about their feelings. Rather than confront things head on, Poppy makes jokes, deflects, and flails about to avoid being direct and honestly exploring her feelings. She seems a bit needy in both attention and affection, and that seems like a poor match for Alex.

I also have never seen two people who claim to be such good friends be so entirely unable to communicate with one another. Jokes, lighthearted conversation, anything superficial is fine, but having an honest, direct, deep conversation about the two of them seems entirely beyond them. Had they just said what needed to be said 8 years ago, they wouldn't be pining after each other for so long. Plot built on miscommunication/noncommunication drives me up a particular wall, so I admit this is maybe a personal hangup.

Finally, while I did like how the author portrayed Poppy and Alex, I didn't feel like enough of the story was actually dedicated to them. Instead, we get lots of short chapters with short, choppy sentences about the places they go together, but nothing that really shows their relationship developing at all. We just have to trust it happens at some point, based on the This Summer story happening concurrently with the flashbacks. Show, don't tell.

I promise I love my husband and am not anti-love/romance. But I just couldn't get into this one.

"Don't just try to be happy when you think of me--be happy."

It took me a bit, but I finally remembered why I had this book on my to-read shelf at home. My mom dropped it in my hands the last time they visited, and said I had to read it. And while I generally don't read books with teenage protagonists, this one was really good. If you know anything about me and my reading preferences, that says something.

So Finn and several members of her family are on a vacation trip in the winter. Dad, mom, sister Chloe and her boyfriend, brother Oz, Uncle Bob, Aunt Karen, and their daughter Natalie, Finn's friend Mo, and hitchhiker Kyle they picked up because his car broke down. The weather deteriorates, their vehicle crashes, and Finn dies. But rather than that being the end of her POV, she lingers as a ghost, as she witnesses what happens to everyone immediately after the accident, after rescue, after they all try and move on after experiencing the things they experienced. Closure is hard, as it turns out.

While the accident is tragic, the actual focus of the book is on how the family moves on. Several bad things happened during the accident, stories about who did what and when got muddled, and sitting on lies causes them to fester. I loved the unique POV of Finn, ghost, unable to really do anything meaningful for anyone, but still forced to witness her family as things start spiraling. It's almost an omniscient POV, except for Finn being unable to know their thoughts, so it's really just her interpreting their actions and what she knows about them. Everybody is flawed in different ways here, and the beauty of the book is how (almost) everyone comes to terms with what happened and moves on in their own way.

Just a really moving book, I think. I felt things about Finn's family and the circumstances. I even think just the right amount of time was spent at the very end tying up the (ending spoiler here) Uncle Bob/Oz incident, because the focus the entire time was on closure after tragedy. I really liked this one.

I was expecting some sort of gritty survival tale using the Franklin expedition story as a framework. Instead, I got a barely lukewarm courtroom drama where Virginia herself has very little impact. Just a disappointment all around.

Virginia is tasked by Lady Franklin to find her husband, with a crew of all women. Lady Franklin has something to prove by using women, ostensibly because they're more thorough than men (something mentioned outright in the beginning of the book). We get a ragtag crew of women of various stripes and backgrounds, including Caprice, whose family is bankrolling the expedition and who is also a rich girl with a mountaineering background. Virginia and Caprice get along for most of the book like oil and water, until on the ice when suddenly after just a few sentences spoken together, they're friends. Tragedy strikes on the ice though, and Virginia finds herself being tried as a murderer for her actions taken while trying to keep everyone safe.

It's a story told in two points of time; the days leading up to and during the expedition to find Franklin, and the period after they return with Virginia on trial. The majority of the chapter POVs are from Virginia herself, but we do occasionally get a chapter or two from some of the other side characters where we get a sense of their backstories and motivations for being there. None of these really made an impact on me though, because other than these brief chapters, all the women felt largely the same in writing.

I didn't care for this book at all. For one, the history this is supposedly built on isn't really used at all in the story beyond giving the author a point in time to write about. I'm fairly familiar with the Franklin expedition, and beyond maybe the cairn of canned goods they find at some point with some throwaway lines about the food being potentially tainted, nothing else is really mentioned about it. If you're going to use an existing historical event as your jumping off point, I feel like more should be done to integrate it into the story.

I also felt like the actual arctic expedition part was glossed over entirely too much. I was expecting some sort of gritty survival tale, but we get entirely too much shipboard drama, and too little actual expedition once they go ashore. Most of the winter is handwaved away, and is mentioned but not shown. The trial afterward, however, feels more like the crux of this book, and it was lukewarm at best. Virginia had very little sway over the events of the trial, which made it just a day-by-day recitation of people lining up to shame her, not a very compelling thing.

All of that combined made it just boring to get through. I don't know who I'd recommend this to, since neither the historical aspect nor the fictional aspect were all that great.

"How strange that the familiar fields and lakes and forests of Earth shone with such celestial glory when one looked at them from afar! Perhaps there was a lesson here; perhaps no man could appreciate his own world until he had seen it from space."

Not a bad book exactly, but you have to be in the mood for what this book is for it to really hit with you.

The Selene is a tourist craft on the Moon, dedicated to ferrying small groups of people around the surface on tours. On one of these tours, an earthquake (moonquake?) causes a sinkhole to open up around Selene and swallow up her and her passengers.

The bulk of the book is taken up by men of science doing their science thing in brainstorming ways to get air to the ship and rescue them. Meanwhile, we're treated to chapters involving the passengers keeping up morale, putting on plays, reading aloud, and generally being goofy (in a 1960s sort of way). It's very much a classic, a product of its time, but not in the racist/sexist way I've used that phrase to mean in other books. More like, a stilted way of writing, a plot with science galore but nothing/almost nothing in the way of character development. Really, the only characterization that exists is in the form of Pat (captain) longing after Sue (stewardess), again, in a 1960s sort of way.

It's fun, it's short, it's a classic for a reason. It's very readable, but you have to really like old sci-fi writing styles to enjoy this one.