altlovesbooks

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.

"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.

"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.

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.

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.

"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.

"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.

"It amazes me to this day how much a little travel changes one's perspective."

What a delightful book. This one has been rotting on my to-read list forever, and I picked it as part of my shortlist of books to get through this year. Not sure why I took so long to get to it, because I really enjoyed this trip.

Asim (our POV character) and Dabir are friends and servants to the Vizir, one the captain of the guard and the other a scholar. An encounter with a fortune teller and an ambiguous destiny ahead of them, the two are charged by the Vizir with retrieving a stolen item that Dabir suspects may be dangerous. The journey takes them far afield, across water, into mysterious places that have been, and into alternate realities where things aren't as they seem. Asim and Dabir fight with everything they have to keep Baghdad from undergoing the same fate as Ubar, but even that might not be enough.

Right off the bat, this is very much sword and sorcery desert fantasy set in 8th century Baghdad, so if that's not your jam, you might not enjoy this. There's djinns, shapeshifting snakes, some musings on faith, and a whole lot of neat swordplay if you decide to give this a go, though. I really enjoyed the two wildly different temperaments of these two friends, with Asim being the typical action-before-thought guard and Dabir being a scholarly thought-before-action sort. Someone in another review I read of this described this book as a buddy cop movie, and I absolutely agree.

Just a really enjoyable book in a setting I don't read too often. I'm absolutely picking up the next books.

I didn't like this one as much as the other two, but appreciate the conclusion/closure.

Part of this had to do with the drastic-feeling change in tone from the first two books. While the first two sat comfortably in sci-fi, almost cyberpunkian mystery with our unnamed synesthete protagonist, this one felt more....I don't even know. Techno-thriller? There's not a lot of mystery here beyond trying to figure out motives, and this book manages to blast past sci-fi and wrap all the way around to fantasy with literal dragons, krakens, and mythical creatures from various cultures showing up (albeit created by technology). It's very fast-paced, and our POV character doesn't seem to do a great job at keeping us in the loop as to what's going on.

Which leads me to the other reason I didn't like this one, the POV character. This book changes POV characters entirely, so we're now sitting in the daughter, Ascalon's, head. She's perfectly acceptable as a POV, but for her to be the exclusive POV in this book made me a bit disappointed. It's drilled into the reader throughout the entire book about how awesome she is at everything (and she even gets more awesome as the book goes on), so the stakes feel especially low in a book where everything should be ramping up. I think I would have appreciated maybe a dual POV including the synesthete, because it felt like Ascalon hit the end of the book along with us and had no more idea what was going on than we did.

I did really like the fleshing out of the Leachateans, their ad-speak and way of life. Their city names, also, were pretty great.

I'm glad to have finished the series though! This was really unique, and despite my hangups in this book, it still kept me reading and interested, so that's something.

Maybe I'm just not a cozy person? I drink tea, wear cardigans, have cats, but I felt like this book never went anywhere and was kinda boring besides. I guess I need stakes, a plot, something carrying me through to get me interested in a book. While I'm sure this will appeal to some people, because it is cute, and there's some good elements here, my attention wandered periodically.

We have a cast of four in this book. Tao, the Teller of Small Fortunes, has a cart and a mule and goes around to villages and towns telling people's fortunes for cash. She runs into Mash and Silt, two reformed(?) thieves on the road to find Mash's young daughter who went missing following a bandit raid. She reads Mash's fortune, and the three of them band together to hopefully find her. Along the way, they also absorb Kina, a baker who loves baking but isn't quite as good as her uncle and who wants to see the world, into their ranks. The four of them go on (very episodic) adventures while the issue of where Mash's daughter is hangs over them.

I guess what I didn't like was the episodic feel of the book. It felt like at every town they'd get another call to action in some form or fashion, they'd act on it/resolve it/run from it, and then on to the next town/call to action. The fate of Mash's daughter isn't brought up nearly as much as you might expect, nor does it seem very urgent since they're always off doing other things instead of tracking down this 4-year-old. I sort of felt like this would be more of an urgent task.

I liked how different the four characters felt, but at the same time, they felt shallow and undeveloped throughout the book. Only Tao really has any sort of character arc, and even that felt low stakes and not all that important to Tao/the larger story. The half-finished feel of the rest of the characters made them feel a bit flat and boring, despite how different they felt from each other.

It's a good book for some low stakes, cozy palm reading fun, but I finished the book wishing more had been done to develop literally anything more than what I got.

"The river can be such a simple girl, but most lovely when she's unadorned."

I clearly didn't get whatever everyone else got out of this book. I thought the setup was interesting, an aging woman escorting a houseboat full of artistic types against the backdrop of a society in flux. Art in almost all forms is disappearing, there's a plague causing people to vanish, armed uprisings, a whole host of things going wrong on the mainland, but on the river there's just them on a weird journey. After taking the wrong branch of the river they start seeing increasingly bizarre sights and stop in towns with unusual afflictions. The Land of Doze where the crew feel exhausted all the time, the Island of Lost Children, a Lord-of-the-Fliesesque town of children where everyone thinks its 1993 instead of 2033, and a whole host of bizarre encounters on the river.

Honestly, this felt a bit like The Phantom Tollbooth, but with tougher to parse allegories. Each encounter the group aboard Silver Lady runs into felt like it had some sort of deeper meaning or allusion to something, but without more to go on I wasn't able to really get anything out of it. The dystopian society the group is on vacation from isn't really reflected in the story itself beyond mention of how unsafe the world outside the river is, and a constant fear that the art they're making aboard is going to vanish. There's also a lack of a through thread tying everything together, making it hard for me to really stay invested in a story that didn't seem like it was going anywhere. The author also shoehorns in mention of Qigong any chance she can get.

I don't know, there's enough reviews out there to make me think I clearly missed something, but I didn't really enjoy this trip downriver.

I won a copy of this eBook through Goodreads Giveaways.

I'm gonna let you guys in on a little secret, but you have to promise not to tell anyone. I actually liked this romance book. It's not without flaws, but in a book club where I've read several romances now where the people felt like over-the-top caricatures of how real people are, the fact that the two main characters felt like actual people was refreshing.

Xavier is a vet in Minnesota who treats a kitten owned by Samantha, a mustard social media manager on her way back to California. There's a bit of love-at-first-sight (exaggeration, they're both head over heels almost immediately), the two have an epic first date, and Samantha returns to California to help her family take care of her ailing mother, leaving both sad and pining for a relationship that never took off. But as these things happen, Xavier meets her in California, and despite Samantha's reluctance, the two start hesitantly exploring a long distance relationship. Unfortunately things are expensive and complicated, and Samantha's mother is getting worse, leaving the two trying to figure out how to make this relationship work.

I loved the setup and the beginning of this book. Two people who felt like people, trying to make a long distance relationship work out. Maybe I'm biased here, because that's how my husband and I started out, but I loved this. I don't have enough first-hand experience with dementia to know if it was handled properly, but I'm judging from the other reviews that it was, which I also enjoyed. There's some really sad/touching moments here that made me feel things.

I guess what I didn't like was that the middle of the book felt like the same points on repeat. Xavier bankrupting himself (both monetarily and in energy) to make these once-in-a-few-months meet ups work. Samantha mentally saying this will never work, and then immediately forgetting all about that during the next meet up. Samantha's mom in decline, but none of the family want to actually help except Samantha. Around and around with these same points without any real progress until the last 10% of the book or so. All of these points are valid and relevant and smart to consider, but it didn't seem like it moved the book forward any having to rehash them so much. It made the middle part feel a bit of a drag.

I also feel like, maybe, there were other options to explore other than either a) putting mom in a home that will clearly abuse her, or b) keeping mom at home and the entire family burns out. There's plenty of resources out there for dementia care, and not all of them are dirty, diseased, unkempt, neglectful homes. Exploring any of the other avenues (in-home nurse care, monetary/professional resources for family members, etc) may have given Samantha a little freedom for the two of them to feel more comfortable about their relationship.

Finally, and this is incredibly minor, the constant reference to ACOTAR was pure pandering to romance readers. Like, "eh? eh? eh? Here's this book you all like, don't you love this reference???". C'mon.

Still, of the romance books I've had to read for my library's book club, this has been my favorite so far.

I'm almost hesitant to give this a true crime tag, because of the amount of artistic liberties the author took along the way to pad out the story. Rather than a full factual telling of what on the surface sounded like a really interesting case involving arsenic poisonings in Hungary, this felt almost historical fiction-y. The author is up front about the inclusion of fictional elements in her author's note in the beginning: "However, to fill in gaps, I have had to imagine or assume certain scenarios.", but I wasn't really expecting the whole book to read like a novel.

And the story itself, while interesting on the face of it, doesn't seem like there's more to it than what's in the title. I don't know if there just wasn't enough factual info out there to write a full length book on or what, but be prepared to read all sorts of descriptive elements about people, places, and how evil Auntie Suzy looks. The story itself really drags in places while the author shoehorns all this in, which is a shame.

Just not a great example of a true crime book, unfortunately. There's an interesting story somewhere here, but it needs more of a factual touch than it got, I think.

"Queens do not accept impossibilities"

Quinn is a con woman in Victorian England, the title of Queen of Fives, and a duty to keep her group afloat through generating income. The income in question here being the fortune of a duke she has five days to dupe into marrying her. So she makes her debut into high society, posing as a woman of means with the hope of catching the duke's eye (or forcing it, if not organically), with a suspicious sister and mother in law watching her every move. There's secrets aplenty in this family though, and this fortune may not be the easy mark Quinn thinks it is.

I guess I was expecting something more heist-forward than this book ended up being. There's lots of eligible-Victorian-lady-doing-eligible-Victorian-lady things here, at balls and shows and outings with the duke. It's all very historical fiction for large chunks of the book, which kind of bored me. I also thought the twists here weren't very unexpected, they're telegraphed fairly early on, and unless you skipped ahead past those parts, you know what's coming. I was rather disappointed about that, too.

Finally, I really wasn't sure what the Queen of Fives was supposed to be as a title. There's only like, five real characters in this book, so I don't know if she was the leader of like two of them, a whole group of them, or what. It's not really established what sort of reach/pull/power she has, if anything, and that also bothered me.

Idk, kind of bland, flat, boring, not what I was expecting.

"Oh, poor you. Here you are on a magical isle and all you can think of is what you don't have."

Two sisters on the run from their controlling father and an opportunistic guy-with-a-boat are stuck at Caraval, some sort of wish-fulfilling carnival that's not well explained but everyone wants to be at. Scarlett is chasing her sister Tella in the company of guy-with-a-boat Julian, who was kissing Tella in the beginning of the book but I guess decided to throw his lot in with Scarlett instead. The crux of this book is Scarlett's search for Tella amidst this weird scavenger hunt game that apparently more than just them are participating in, but we really only see the two of them doing anything.

For the good, the author managed to nail that dreamy, frenetic atmosphere a book like this aims for. Some of the descriptions of the locations, the people, the situations were written well. But on the other side of this coin, the prose is very purple. The author/Scarlett describes a lot of things using color/vibes, and it's sometimes hard to follow along. The ending (such as it is) and last, say, 20 pages or so, was especially hard to understand with all the prose and the twists upon twists happening all at the same time.

I also kind of hated that there's nonexistent world building here. There's some mention of the island nation Scarlett and Tella are from being, idk, isolated or blockaded or prevented in some way from participating in the rest of the world, but that's never really explored. Did the larger world even have a name? Other nations? No idea. Caraval, too, isn't really explained much, aside from that it's held every year. Every coincidence, every twist (and there are plenty of those), every little issue that might come up, is chalked up to magic and nothing more is said or explained. I get the sense that the magic is whatever the author needs it to be at any given point.

Finally, the characters were all kind of unlikeable. Scarlett mentions her upcoming marriage to a guy she's never even met approximately 80 million times, and basically decides her sister's future for her under the guise of knowing what's best for Tella. Tella seems to make a game out of throwing her sister under a convenient bus whenever she wants. And Julian exists in the book as a love interest, but I never quite understood what his appeal was beyond being Scarlett's ride along.

So, stars for some great writing and nailing the atmosphere, and stars removed for a poor ending, confusing descriptions, no grasp of the larger world and why we should care about Caraval, and unlikeable characters.

"I think she's going to kill me."

This is only a very tenuous 4 stars, and I'm willing to be argued lower. I was riveted through a lot of the book, but as I got closer to the end, I started to realize that not a lot I was super interested in was actually going to matter by the end of the book. There also feels like a bit of a tone shift between the beginning and ending that somewhat disappointed me. But the journey for 3/4ths of the book nearly almost made up for a lackluster finish.

We have two aging sisters locked in a garden they've lived in all their lives. At some point when they were young, the civilized world ended, and the two sisters and their household locked themselves away as best they could to survive. Now grown and outlived their parents, these sisters only know what's within the boundaries of their walls, and a book their mother left them outlining how to care for everything. But strict Evelyn starts falling apart as less and less of what their mother left them starts mattering, and despite easygoing Lily's attempts to talk her down from her strict adherence to schedule and routine, the two normally close sisters start fighting. Amid this is the arrival of a boy from the outside world, something that shouldn't exist in Evelyn's eyes. The boy forces Evelyn to confront memories of her and her sister's past, and presents her with an alternate view that maybe everything she'd been brought up believing wasn't true at all.

So there's a lot to like here. I loved getting to know the sisters and their garden, and piecing together bits and pieces of their past to try and figure out where things went wrong and why. But as we went along in the book and we get more and more of these short memories from Evelyn's viewpoint, I start realizing that not a lot of it matters. There's nothing in the way of world building outside of the garden, so we never really find out what happened (though pretty easy guesses can be made). I did like the unreliable narrator feel of both Evelyn and her mom, it kept me guessing for a lot of the book to try and figure out where things were going to end up.

What disappointed me is that I felt like the author set up some really great, really dark ideas and then didn't follow through with them. Ending spoilers here: one of my big problems was the setup for the bodies in the ice house. The author makes it clear that both Evelyn and her sister have been eating the people that were killed when Evelyn was young, but then quickly dances away from that and doesn't really address it again. The boy is understandably worried he's next on the menu, but aside from a bit of "I'm scared of you" dialogue, it's wrapped up and ignored fairly quickly. I also feel like some of the memories we get from Evelyn about her mom and dad were leading towards the mom killing the dad, but I couldn't tell if that actually happened or not. Again, nothing's really spelled out or connected to what's going on currently. I guess I just wish, in a book with a setup and setting as unsettling as we get here, the author had gone all the way and leaned into some of these ideas more to lend a bit more impact to the story.

I also had a hard time figuring out what genre this book is in. I ultimately landed on literary fiction, because while the overall setting leans dystopian sci fi, none of that really bleeds into the garden at all.

Just a really interesting book that I wish had gone all the way into some of the ideas presented.