altlovesbooks

I want you to know that I waffled hard on this rating. The universe, the unique characters, the premise, the writing, were all really well done and a joy to read about. I really wanted to give this book a high rating for that alone. But without the full package of a satisfying ending tying a bow on things, I have a hard time recommending it, and that bums me out.

The story is told from three different viewpoints. Ocean is a pilot with a past that follows her wherever she goes. Her current ship captain doesn't think much of her, but as the ship's XO, she gets on well with everyone else. Haven is out on his own for the first time after growing up in an insular community (think an Amish rumspringa, but in space), and doesn't understand why his father insisted he see the outside universe before settling down. He's currently acting as a medic on Ocean's ship. And Teo, rich kid and youngest sibling, forever underestimated on account of his family, becomes a scapegoat for a terrible tragedy and ends up on the run and taking shelter on Ocean's ship.

The strong points of this book are the three main characters. Each feels different, refreshing, and new, and bring a lot of thoughtful points to think about. Haven, in particular, allows the author to muse about death, loss, and grieving, through the lens of Haven's culture that seems maybe Buddhist through its use of sky burials. There's also a bit of romantic build-up between characters, which I thought was handled well. I thought the setting, too, was very unique, with South Korea now the dominant space race, space pirates, planet colonies, and all sorts of tasty sci-fi things for your brain to envision. Unfortunately, a lot of the setting goes unused. The book focuses itself on a very narrow group of people, in a very closed setting. You don't get a real sense for how large the Alliance is or what it is they even do in space. It's kind of a letdown.

I'm willing to overlook a lot of flaws for the sake of well developed characters, thoughtful dialogue, and quiet moments where we get to know the cast, but I cannot overlook the ending of this book. Or, rather, the not-ending of this book, because after a slow, deliberate pace for 80% of the book, suddenly within the last 30 or 40 pages the author hits the gas and you start hurtling past plot points. There's not even a wall of a climax to hit at the end either, because the book just ends, lots of things unfinished or unresolved. That's a bummer! There's apparently a second book coming later this year that maybe will pick things up, but I hate how this book feels like half of a book.

Still, great writing, imaginative setting, characters I wish we could get to know more about. The lack of a proper ending to the book, though, makes it hard for me to recommend it as-is.

I was annoyed by this more than I was amused. Rather than being a fleshed out collection of stories from library workers, it was a compilation of mostly dialogue exchanges. An example:

Elderly Patron: [timidly] Where are the computers?

Me: There are some in the Adult Department and in the coffee/vending machine area.

Elderly Patron: Thank you. If I get lost, someone will come find me, right?

That example is basically tonally the feeling of the book. Aside from the dialogue exchanges being annoying, I also kind of hated how it felt like the entire book was making the same tired jokes. Haha, elderly people and computers, amirite? Haha, mental illness is funny from the outside, high five. Haha, kids say the darndest things, those rascals. It felt mean spirited in a lot of places, and honestly, just between you and me....

....a lot of the stories felt made up. Particularly when you get to some of the exchanges involving "difficult" patrons (which, don't even really sound all that difficult). A patron will have an issue with a late fee or perceived treatment or some other library thing, and whoever is relating the exchange says exactly the perfect thing at the perfect time with the exact amount of snark. You almost expect an "and then everyone in the library clapped" at the end of some of these short exchanges.

Just an overall miss with me. I gave it a star for being library-focused, but I couldn't recommend this to anyone.

Bland and forgettable to a scary degree. I finished this book maybe an hour and a half ago and already had to refresh myself on what happened. Not a whole lot, as it turns out. The title of this is actually a bit misleading, since this book really isn't about the bookstore at all, which also has me a little sore.

Takako, doormat, discovers her boyfriend had been cheating on her, and also lost her job at the same time. She's saved from having to make any tough decisions though, by her divorced uncle calling her up and inviting her to stay at his bookshop out of the city. She stays in an upper room above the bookshop, minds the store for her uncle, and meets some of the locals. She still pines for her old boyfriend though, and even when confronting him still seemed like she just wanted to pretend nothing happened. At one point in the book she starts pestering her uncle about why her aunt left him, and suddenly the book is not about Takako trying to grow a spine, but about her aunt and uncle reconciling. The book ends.

This is not about the bookshop or books really, beyond a casual plot point of Takako rediscovering her love of reading. The writing is flat, the characters are flat, and it's hard to actually feel anything for any of these characters if the writing isn't selling them to you. I also felt like the book spent time trying to build up Takako/the bookshop that it felt jarring when suddenly the point of the book shifted to Takako/the aunt/reconciliation.

Plus I sort of hated the scene early on between Takako, her uncle and the boyfriend. Her doormat personality made it hard for me to actually like her.

A perfectly readable book, but bland and forgettable by the end.

DNF @ 8%

Maybe its too soon to be throwing in the towel on this one, but it just isn't flowing well for me. The contemporary-feeling humor thrown into a period piece just took me out. I'd rather move onto something that grabs me a bit faster than this one isn't.

"Fortune's wheel did what it did, regardless of your hopes, prayers, cleverest planning."

Just another great GGK book here, even if it doesn't unseat my top 3 by him. A solid plot, tight pacing, and interesting, deep characters makes for a satisfying read. Evidently set during the Hundred Years' War, and loosely follows the life of a French poet, Francois Villon.

Thierry Villar, vaguely notable tavern poet and a self-proclaimed nobody to the realm, is tasked with stepping up and being a somebody following the murder of the King's brother. Investigating places the law can't reach, asking questions of people that they can't ask, and basically being an informant involved in a realm-shaking murder. What follows is Villar's progress from being a nobody to gaining friends in powerful circles, amidst the backdrop of a potential civil war.

What I love about this book (and GGK's books in general, but it's very evident in this book) is how he can take a minor character, even in their own story, and turn them into something living, breathing, and remarkable. The story's main character is Villar of course, but there's a slew of other POVs that each get their own backstory and contribute to the larger tale. There's also several minor characters that, while not given their own voice in the story, are sent on their literary way with a few lines from GGK about how events affected their life and how they end up. There's a couple Easter eggs here for people who read his other books.

Just a satisfying story to read. While a bit more straightfoward in the telling than some of his other books, I was still really glad to have read this, and was in love with the story/characters throughout.

"I'm the best in the universe at letting bad shit happen to me."

This wasn't a bad book at all, and actually it had me hooked up until the ending started rolling, and then it felt like I was reading a different book entirely.

In a universe of multiple Earths, Cara is unique in that her self on most of these other worlds has already died. This allows her the privilege of visiting these other Earths and gathering information without being killed herself as the multiverse tries to correct itself. She makes a decent living doing this and maintains ties with her family living outside her walled city, but she also has a pretty large secret she's kept hidden from everyone.

Up front I'll say that the author can write. This was more philosophical and character-driven than I was expecting, and I was delighted by that. The multiverse aspect is really just used as a setting, and despite being important to Cara's character, manages to take a back seat to everything else going on. There's thoughts and discussions on classism and what it takes to survive a world of haves and have nots which I appreciated, and I loved how Cara approached her life, her job, and her resiliency at managing to survive.

When the ending started happening, though, I kind of felt like I was reading a different book. While the ending itself (prior to the epilogue) made sense and was at least a little bit satisfying in the moment, I thought that (ending/epilogue spoilers here) the author potentially walking back Adra/Adam being bad with a reconciliation with Nik Nik undid a lot of what the ending already finalized. I don't know if any of that is addressed in the second book, but it felt really vague and wishywashy.

I also thought the relationship between Dell and Cara wasn't handled well. It's basically one-sided for a majority of the book, with some hints at more, until the ending when suddenly things go from 0 to 100 without any buildup. It didn't feel natural, it didn't feel right, and felt more like a checkbox than anything else. I thought that was disappointing.

I really did enjoy a lot of what this book was doing, I just wish it had ended better. I might check out the second book to see if anything from the ending here is resolved more fully there, but I won't make it a priority.

Before I get started, I just want to note that this author is a member of Monty Python. I didn't realize that before I read the introduction, and then I had to do an audible double-take when it came up.

So this is a book about the HMS Erebus, a ship constructed in 1826, left to sit for several years, and was finally scooped up to be used in both the Ross Expedition (1839) headed to Antarctica and the Franklin Expedition (1845) lost on a voyage to the Northwest Passage/Canadian Arctic. We're introduced to the main players in both expeditions, and are treated to first-hand accounts of these early days of the Erebus. Unfortunately, not a lot was found pertaining to the fate of the Franklin expedition, so the portion of the book surrounding that was fascinatingly mysterious.

This is an incredibly well-researched book about a ship I think I'd only heard about peripherally. The entire first three quarters of the book feature all sorts of first hand accounts, letters, etc from people directly on or affiliated with the ship about their time aboard. The section about the Franklin Expedition is, understandably, light on this, as there was, y'know, nobody left to interview and no journals found, but the author does a good job of piecing together the available information at the time of the book's publication and presenting a (few) compelling story(ies) about the fate of the crew.

Just a really interesting book all around. I thought going into it that it would just be about the Franklin Expedition, but was pleasantly surprised with the additional backstory and history behind this ship. Highly recommend for ship/history buffs.

I thought this book was a fascinating look into the NYC restaurant industry, from a front-of-house point of view instead of your standard chef/back-of-house view. From his unique position and career in the restaurant industry, we get a lot of info about how a restaurant operates when seating diners, how the staff interacts up front, and all the myriad ways guests either intentionally or accidentally make a restaurant's night hell.

Yes, the restaurant industry is rife with sex, drugs, and alcohol. That was true in the 80s, and while outside scrutiny has improved working conditions overall, remains mostly true today. What I enjoyed most about this book aside from the insider tips and anecdotes was seeing the author go through a bit of character development and distancing himself from these things as his career progresses. People rating this book poorly because they don't agree with the author's lifestyle choices aren't giving the book the chance it deserves, in my opinion.

Just a really interesting, entertaining book about an industry I don't work in, but am fascinated by.

"I'd finally met someone with bigger control issues than I had."

Georgia's great-grandmother Scarlett passed away and left her everything, including control of her book rights, one left unfinished. Georgia's mom, eager for a payday to gamble away, poses as Georgia to get a publisher to find a writer to finish Scarlett's book. Enter Noah, modern fiction writer, arrogance personified. Georgia stubbornly wants to leave Scarlett's book unfinished, Noah stubbornly/arrogantly wants to finish Scarlett's book. Georgia reluctantly agrees, and the two start going through Scarlett's old letters between her and her pilot husband, while also working through their myriad control issues.

This story's told from two POVs, obviously Georgia and Noah are the modern couple finishing the book, but we also get Scarlett's POV from her relationship with Jameson during WWII. Jameson is a pilot, Scarlett is a plotter, and the two are basically head over heels for each other immediately.

I think of the two POVs, Scarlett/Jameson was my favorite. While they do fall in love pretty much instantly (and instalove makes my teeth hurt), I felt like Scarlett had her principles in the right places, felt like she had a voice and mattered to the plot, and overall just felt like a good person. On the other side of the coin, I felt like Noah and Georgia were annoying as characters. I wish more had been done to develop them and their relationship, because it felt like it only took one (not very eventful) rock climbing trip for Georgia to turn a 180 from being annoyed at/bothered by Noah to banging him. They're both kind of unpleasant in how they treated each other until then, and then afterwards it's like it never happened and they're all lovey dovey.

I also see a lot (the majority?) of people here saying how emotionally wrecked they were after reading this, and maybe my sad gene is broken, but I didn't feel particularly much of anything. Maybe I shouldn't have read The Women by Kristin Hannah before this, because that book did for me what this book didn't.

Finally, this may be me reading between the lines and projecting too much, but I also didn't like how much shade the author threw at Noah for being not a Romance writer, for having the audacity to have sad endings in his Fiction books, and just a general feeling that if you don't read Romance you're doing it wrong. It just felt weirdly pointed whenever it was mentioned by Georgia in-story.

It was okay, I guess is my summary. I didn't dislike it in any strong way, I just felt like it was missing something to make me either care/feel sad about the WWII story, or to sell me on Noah/Georgia being a good match for each other.

Kind of a book that makes you want to quit your job and go visit Yellowstone. This is my second Peter Heller book, and I enjoyed this one more than the other one I read a few months ago (Burn). It's not without flaws, but I loved how the author can paint a scene.

The story follows the point of view of a Yellowstone park ranger, Ren, who makes a living monitoring the park, saving tourists from themselves, and keeping an eye out for illegal hunting. We meet a small cast of characters who either work in Yellowstone themselves, or in the nearby town, one of these being Hilly, a wolf biologist. She lives and breathes wolves, has a temper, and manages to get on the wrong side of the wrong person in town. A trap is laid out, but not for a wolf, and Ren gets pulled into finding the culprit.

Up front I'll say that this is a really slow burn mystery that really isn't all that mysterious. I'd say the flow of the story is pretty well broadcast throughout, so I wasn't particularly startled at how things played out in the end. But what really did it for me with this book was the way the author depicted life in Yellowstone. Amidst Ren's investigation we get small little vignettes of him doing park ranger things, and even though this is a fiction book, every bit of it rings true to how I imagine things playing out. We also get flashbacks into Ren's past with a late wife he lost to illness, and by the end of the book I was rooting for him to find some measure of peace of mind. I wasn't quite as on board with Hilly's use of wolf euphemisms near the end of the book, but I guess when wolves are what you know, that's how you look at life.

Just a nice book about a park I really want to visit one day.

" 'Objects that held my heart' is how Breitwieser described his finds."

This was a fascinating book about a guy who was so obsessed with the beauty of art that he felt compelled to liberate pieces from museums and art galleries just so he could enjoy them at home. Home being...an attic he and his girlfriend lived in at his mom's house. Dozens, and then hundreds of pieces get taken, until his own hubris and compulsion finally gets him in the end.

Alongside Breitweiser's story, we also get some really great info about art theft. Did you know Picasso hired a guy to steal two statuettes from the Louvre in 1907 for the equivalent of $10? I sure didn't, but I thought that was fascinating.

Just a really compelling book about something I didn't realize was so prevalent (50,000 art thefts each year!). Highly recommend.

"Raptor Red would laugh if evolution had given her a way to generate that sound."

This is like an old History channel documentary on dinosaurs, but fictionalized. I read this with a narrator's voiceover going in my head the entire time.

Raptor Red is a Utahraptor (like the raptor from Jurassic Park, not Velociraptor, that's fake news) making her way through prehistoric life. The story is told fictionally; we have actual plot threads, characters (of a sort), a climax and conclusion. I don't think I've read anything similar to compare it to, and I appreciated this unique way to tell a historical story. There's lots of ups and downs in Raptor Red's life, contextualized by the author's vast knowledge of her species and things she might realistically encounter.

The writing is a bit young, maybe a younger-to-mid YA audience would be more appropriate. I also thought the middle parts felt a bit like they dragged; it wasn't until (mid book spoilers here) Raptor Red meets her new mate that things started to progress a bit more cohesively. The ending made me feel things I wasn't expecting for this raptor family I had come to know so well.

Just an overall really enjoyable book.

Like if Oceans 8 had a focus on Fast and Furious's family, but set in a cyberpunky space station with lots of representation. You've got a team of people set on liberating valuable items from a corporate CEO with the intent to ransom them back to him and make bank. That's basically it, but it was enough for me.

I'm gonna fly in the face of everyone here who had complaints about the boring plot and say up front that the plot is secondary to the characterization. Is the heist fun? Absolutely. It's clear the author did a lot of cybersecurity/physical security research, and it shows without being too bogged down in technical minutiae. Is it incredibly satisfying/tense/subtle/layered? Not particularly. There isn't a lot unexpected here to keep anyone guessing. But I thought the real joy in this book, and the reason for the five stars, was getting to know Edie and Angel and the complex relationship between them. Even the secondary characters, the people making up the crew, were interesting, I thought, and each had their personal strengths they brought to the table to make the heist happen.

I especially enjoyed the Hawaiian lens we experience the story through. I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator really nailed all the various slang/pidgin thrown in to really bring conversations to life. I wish that I had a bit of translation or a glossary or something to reference sometimes, though, but context clues did a good job of carrying meaning through.

Just a fun heist with colorful characters in a unique setting. Highly enjoyed it.

This is a hard book to rate/explain, but here goes.

Margo and Patricia are both librarians at a small public library branch in the Chicago 'burbs. Margo arrived earlier in the year than Patricia, and was a nurse prior to her (forced) career change. You see, (and this is all in the first chapter, so not a spoiler), 'Margo' is not Margo at all, and is instead a persona she created to distance herself from all the patients she killed at previous jobs. Now she's a librarian trying not to draw attention to herself, trying to acclimate to a job where people don't come in sick and reliant upon her to keep them alive, trying and sort of failing at keeping these intrusive thoughts at bay. Patricia is a failed writer trying a career change into something more reliable, trying and failing to resist the urge to write, trying to appease her loser of a boyfriend she doesn't seem to like too much. But when Margo starts behaving strangely at the library, she starts writing this down, and unwittingly turning Margo into a character for one of her books. She starts watching Margo closely, and by extension, starts drawing closer to Margo's truth.

The story is told from each of their viewpoints, and both are unreliable narrators, and also pretty unlikeable. 'Margo' is unlikeable just by merit of being a serial killer, but also because she has some pretty savage things she thinks about the patrons who come into her library (and admittedly that hits close to home). Patricia is unlikeable for folding like a lawn chair when her boyfriend tells her that basically everything she does is terrible, for stringing said boyfriend along for so long, for being so adverse to the idea of writing, and for (late story spoilers here) never turning Margo in, despite all the things she discovers about her. But unlikeable characters are sort of the point of this story, as a feature, not a bug. Most of this story wouldn't work if people behaved as they should, because this is a story about two liars, not just one.

I think my only hangup about this book was the ending. (ending spoilers here) I thought, for all the buildup we got between Margo and Patricia, I was expecting more of an explosive finale. And while the building burning down is, by definition, explosive, the actual dispute was over so abruptly. I don't know, for all of the slow burn, I feel like the ending should have been a bit more satisfying. I did like how the author turned Patricia into another Margo at the end, though. That was a really nice twist.

So, a great story marred by not sticking the landing. It's a slow burn, not quite action-packed, but psychological enough that I was entertained throughout.

"Everything rests on a knife's edge."

I realized when making my to-read list for this year that, for whatever reason, I had gotten up to book five of this amazing series years ago and never bothered to finish it up. I went into it a bit hesitant after being gone from the desert for so long, but this book delivered and then some. An amazing end to an epic fantasy series I wish more people knew about.

I'm not going to summarize the plot here because it's the culmination of five books of setup. Not only would it not make sense to someone jumping in fresh, it'd also be rife with spoilers from the previous books. You'll just have to trust me that this book's story is a worthy conclusion to this desert fantasy series.

All of our favorite cast members are here, with nothing and nobody extraneous. I felt some of the previous books dragged on a bit (Beneath the Twisted Trees, I'm looking at you), but this book has the advantage of being set up to be wall-to-wall plot with nothing really new in the mix. Watching everything come together was delightful. I also appreciated that the author included a 'Story so Far' section up front to catch readers up to speed, because a lot happens in the previous books.

Just a great book, a great end, to a great series. Well done.

I haven't had a book make me feel more unwelcome to read it since I read Goliath by Tochi Onyebuchi. The difference is that I went into Goliath knowing I wasn't the target audience and rated accordingly. For this one, I wasn't quite prepared for the amount of fights this book picked about gender and racial issues, and I had a nagging feeling the entire time that it didn't need to be this way.

I actually really liked this take on a post-apocalyptic society. Rather than the main characters being survivalists, being prepared for everything, being ready to plow through all adversaries in their way, this book focuses on two rather ordinary suburbanites from New Jersey trying to reach their daughter in California. A plague wiped out a large chunk of the world's population, leaving the rest behind immune to the disease. In the wake of the plague, society fractures, narrows in on itself, and the simple act of reaching a loved one across the country becomes incredibly difficult.

Right up front I'll say that I loved the writing in this book. I loved experiencing how a world-ending plague changes your average family's outlook, and how they grapple with old-world morals about stealing and killing and helping fellow survivors. The author did a fantastic job of painting how the world changed for average Americans.

But.....and here's a huge but.....the author really comes out swinging with a myriad of societal hangups they clearly have. The couple featured in this book are biracial, and right out the gate we get a lot of passages about how nearly everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen in the future is the fault of white males in society. Which, fine, we can talk about those issues, I have no problem with it and do see a lot of it in society, but the lengths this author goes to really pin every struggle in this book on that demographic is really quite impressive. We also get an extensive scene in the book where it feels like the fourth wall comes down and the author talks to the reader about legalization of marijuana, living in the present being optimal and 'the future' being a societal concept invented to generate stress, and other airy philosophical topics that don't seem to have a bearing on the book. It really felt shoehorned in. The ending also kind of had some vague (ending spoilers here) ideas about religion being bad and atheism being good, which, while I'm not religious, felt a bit like the author taking the mic again.

Ultimately I gave this book 3 and a half stars, but it fought me the entire way. I wanted so bad to rate it higher given how I enjoyed the premise, but it really felt like the author had a ton of axes to grind in it.

I guess I was expecting something different when my friends and I picked this one up. It's supposedly what inspired Lovecraft to create his entire mythos, so I was expecting something more...I don't know...existential horror? Unsettling? I didn't really get much of that. It was a fine read, just not what I was expecting, I guess.

It's a series of four short stories about a mysterious book, 'The King In Yellow', where anyone who picks it up to read goes mad. Each of the four stories features a different person in a different setting, but beyond the common thread of the book, there isn't a lot to really explain what this book is, where it came from, or why it is the way it is. As the reader, you're just along for the 'how is this person going to manifest their madness' ride, with no real backstory or explanation.

There's a lot of unreliable narrator business going on, obviously, which I thought was fun. You're never quite sure if things actually happen the way things are written, and there's some room to draw conclusions of your own at the end of each story. There's also some unexpected humor written in by the author in the form of descriptions of places and people, which I enjoyed but also felt tonally different than what I was expecting out of the story.

So, not bad, but also don't go into this expecting Lovecraft. It's a neat read featuring unreliable narrators, but I really didn't feel existentially horrified or even mildly concerned at all while reading it.

I refuse to give this the thriller tag, because it's not all that thrilling.

Nora is a neuroarchitect (yeah, I had to look that up too) living in Brooklyn with boyfriend Jack. She's...not exactly estranged from her family, but near enough to it. Her father, Liam, dies suddenly from falling off a cliff at his California home. Whoops. Brother Sam contacts Nora, suspicious about the cause of death being ruled an accident, and whisks Nora away to do some whirlwind investigating in California. What's covered in this book is the complicated history of this family, Nora's reluctance to form attachments with anyone around her, and everyone's extensive backstory which doesn't usually play a part in the eventual resolution of their father's death.

This was way more of a family drama than it was either a mystery or a thriller. The plot moves at a glacial pace, so if you're here for the 'what happened to Liam' portion of this story, settle in for the long haul. I feel like the author tried to do too much with this story, and should have leaned into either a total family drama and left the murder mystery out of it, or a total murder mystery and left the rest of the family baggage out. As it is, we bounce between ideas a lot during the bulk of this story, and it takes forever for any one of the ideas to reach something close to a conclusion.

I also kind of didn't like Nora as a character either. She has commitment issues, and large parts of this book are her mental thoughts about how she should call boyfriend Jack to check in, continues to not do so, actively ignore his texts, and generally treats what seems like a great guy terribly. The relationship drama included in this book felt entirely unnecessary.

Kind of a miss with me. It's short though!

I'm no stranger to books about conditions in North Korea, so it's hard for me to say that I didn't really enjoy the presentation of this one. We get the story of Shin, escapee from Camp 14, the only one so far who was born in the camp and who managed to escape. We learn a lot about conditions within Camp 14, but only from Shin's perspective. From the author's commentary, it sounds like his position within the camp was actually fairly privileged, which makes this even tougher to read knowing that even worse things were undoubtedly happening elsewhere. Shin reveals what it took for him to survive, the indoctrination he underwent that warped his view of the people around him, and how he finally broke through it all and escaped.

It's a powerful story, but the author notes early on that Shin wasn't very forthcoming initially, and even after telling his story to the author, changed it at least once. He also comes off as being very disconnected and uncaring about what was going on around him, but it's hard to say if that was the author's voice retelling Shin's story, or a disassociation from what was happening on his part. Either way, it was hard connecting with the story being told.

Finally, I had a hard time with the author acting as a narrator during Shin's story, where we'd suddenly get some North Korean backstory related to something Shin said in the middle of his story. Maybe Shin's story would've connected with me more if we didn't keep having asides in the middle of things.

It's still a powerful book, these small issues aside. Even if only a portion of what Shin said is true as told, it still shines an important light on the terrible conditions within North Korea.

Mal (short for Malware) is an AI stuck in the world of humans. When a conflict between body-modded Federals and anti-modding Humanists breaks out, the larger information network is blocked, leaving Mal stuck inside whatever implant or device is large enough to contain him. In his quest to find a way back to the information network, he inhabits various drones, corpses, a few live humans, and finds a small group of friends along the way that he feels obligated to keep safe as well.

This is hyped up to be like Martha Wells' Murderbot books, and I do see signs of that. Mal has a very dry sense of humor, being AI, and the majority of this book is his wry observations about humans and human behavior. This is very much a character-driven story, in that the plot, such as it is, isn't really a factor until the last few chapters of the book. You have the backdrop of this large conflict, but you don't get a lot of backstory (or...forwardstory, for that matter) about what it is or why it's happening. Even the ending, where the plot finally appears, is kind of forgettable, because the rest of the book didn't really set you up to care about a resolution. I also found the conflict and resolution a bit messy, to be honest.

So, the humor was pretty decent, but the rest of the book was unfocused and didn't get me to care much about the ending. Kind of a miss.

"I reckon you had a decent life and died a decent death. Ain't that enough?"

A pleasant, but not all that memorable, book about three people who find themselves in the care of Hirasaka, the man who flashes your life before your eyes when you die. Told in three separate stories, Hirasaka tends to an elderly preschool teacher, a Yakuza member, and an abused girl, when they find themselves there on death's doorstep. Two of the three stories begins with a photograph that doesn't quite develop of one of their cherished memories. Hirasaka offers to take them back in time to the period of the memory so they can retake their photograph exactly as they remember it, and we learn the backstory behind each of their memories. The final story framework is a bit different, but ultimately still follows the 'go back in time, get some backstory, take a photo' structure.

It was a decent book, but like I said, not all that memorable. The third story is definitely the most emotional, but I actually enjoyed the second story with the Yakuza member a bit more. Something about Waniguchi's interactions with Mouse and Kosaki really made the story for me, and I kind of liked how pragmatic Waniguchi was about his life in retrospect.

I do wish we learned more about Hiraska himself though, as it felt like some things were set up to make you wonder about him in the beginning, but were dropped by the end. There's no real ending to this book per se; he wraps up the third person's arc, we get a brief scene involving Yama, the guy who brings Hirasaka the information about the people/jobs, and that's the end. I kind of felt like more needed to be said, but I guess the author disagreed.

It's a decent book, but I'm not sure much will stick with me.

Better than the other book by McFadden I read, Never Lie, but still not a super great book. I think I'm just hard to please when it comes to mysterious thrillers.

We have two points of time represented in this book. Present day Sydney who broke up with her ex- and has been trying to put herself out there on a dating app and be not single because her biological clock is ticking, her mom is harping at her, and god she doesn't want to be old and single is the main focus. The story opens with her matching with Kevin, a creep who misrepresented himself on the app and keeps insinuating himself into Sydney's life, despite being kneed in the manlybits and not taking a hint from there. She has two friends, Bonnie whose scrunchies are part of her identity and nobody else on the planet wears scrunchies except Bonnie, and Gretchen who has an art exhibit at a museum and is dating the weird handyman in Sydney's apartment.

We also have past Tom in high school, who has a weird bug-obsessed friend named....something (I can't recall his real name, was it ever mentioned?), but everyone calls him Slug because he eats bugs. Tom has a crush on classmate Daisy, has an alcoholic and abusive father, and a weak mother who puts up with it all. He's also strangely obsessed with and gets excited by blood. We get chapters about Tom navigating his crush on Daisy, them becoming something adjacent to boyfriend/girlfriend in a clean hand holding sort of way, and Slug being awkward, while drama at school about a missing classmate escalates and makes Tom a person of interest.

Honestly I was way more invested in Tom's past chapters than I was in Sydney's chapters. I thought Sydney was an idiot who managed to surround herself with people waving all manner of red flags for a multitude of reasons. The degree she blinds herself to what's going on around her for the sake of sex with a Hot Guy is mind-boggling, actually, and the mental gymnastics she goes through to rationalize things after the fact is rather amazing. I realize most of what's going on around Sydney is the author's love of misdirection, but I feel like the main character should at least be mildly concerned about any number of things she doesn't seem to care about. It's wild.

Also, as a person who proudly wears scrunchies in the Year of Our Lord 2025, I'm rather offended at Sydney getting so hung up on the concept of people wearing scrunchies in today times. Everytime she came across one in the story, only Bonnie could have worn it, because Bonnie was the only person who would ever wear a scrunchie. It's inconceivable anyone else would, really. They're so dated. Jeez.

I thought the twist was unexpected though, even if the ending to it all was hard to believe. And it did keep me reading, so it's an entertaining read, if you can get past the main character being so dense.

When you have 50 essays on a wide variety of food-related topics in a book less than 300 pages, you get a lot of breadth but not a lot of depth. At roughly 5 pages a topic, be prepared for the interesting bits you dig out of here to be glossed over and forgotten about. There's a lot of interesting food trivia here, but in digestible factoid form. The essays start in prehistory and work their way forwards in time which was nice, but aside from that have little to do with one another, lending the whole book kind of a fragmented feel. I found a few chapters interesting, but because I couldn't tell you what they are now that I've finished the book, I can say that the whole experience was a little forgettable.

Also, the author has a clear idea of what she thinks food consumption looks like in an ideal world, so you'll see a lot of that as well. I have zero problems with veganism even if I'm not part of that group, but I got a bit bored of seeing it come up so often.

An acceptable book with interesting factoids, but also not interesting enough to really stick with me.

I sort of expected more from a mystery thriller set in old 1920s Hollywood. Maybe that was a me and my expectations problem?

Mary Rourke is someone movie studios call on when they need something fixed or resolved quietly that might have a PR impact. She's called to the home of Norma Carlton, a household name in silent films, because she was found dead. She's also working on a film Hollywood can't stop talking about, The Devil's Playground, an open secret everyone knows about but nobody wants anything to do with because of a curse. She sets about investigating this woman's murder to see if there's something larger at play than what it appears on the surface, and finds out there's an entire dark underside to Hollywood she wasn't prepared for.

There's also a second viewpoint mentioned in the summary of this book, but only appears in the very beginning and at the very end, to introduce the reader to the idea of The Devil's Playground being this lost film nobody has a copy of and to bring the whole thing to a close. I don't really consider this book a dual viewpoint story, as the vast majority is from Mary Rourke's viewpoint, with some interspersed historical chapters involving some essential backstory.

Right off the bat I want to say that I thought the writing was excellent. I love my descriptive scenes, and this book really nails the feel of 1920s prohibition Hollywood. Full points for that. I also like Mary Rourke's character, and thought she was a great person to share this story with. She seems smart, no-nonsense, and able to handle all the alpha personalities around her fairly well. It's also clear that the author did their homework on 1920s Hollywood, as there's a lot of details included within the story that sometimes was distracting.

Unfortunately, I thought the overall mystery was kind of lackluster and overdeveloped for the eventual payoff. I didn't really see the ending coming, and felt like a lot of what happened before wasn't all that relevant in hindsight. This overdevelopment also led to so many characters to keep up with, all with delightfully generic Hollywood names, that I had a hard time remembering who was who until well into a conversation.

It was just an okay book in the end, but ultimately not very memorable.

DNF @ 41%

I'm no stranger to Japanese fiction or their slice of life-style books, but I never really got into this one. There's plenty here about pianos and piano tuning that I wasn't aware of which was interesting, but I never really got into the main character's mental hurdles behind becoming a respected piano tuner, which was the bulk of the book up until this point. There definitely seems to be people who really enjoyed this book, and I wish I could stick it through to the end to see why, but having to force myself to read even a few pages was my cue to move on.