Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss

A+ #BookReview: The Crescent Moon Tearoom by Stacy Sivinski

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: The Crescent Moon Tearoom by Stacy SivinskiThe Crescent Moon Tearoom by Stacy Sivinski
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, cozy mystery, historical romance, historical fantasy
Pages: 336
Published by Atria Books on October 1, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A cozy and uplifting debut novel about three clairvoyant sisters who face an unexpected twist of Fate at the bottom of their own delicate porcelain cups.
Ever since the untimely death of their parents, Anne, Beatrix, and Violet Quigley have made a business of threading together the stories that rest in the swirls of ginger, cloves, and cardamom at the bottom of their customers’ cups. Their days at the teashop are filled with talk of butterflies and good fortune intertwined with the sound of cinnamon shortbread being snapped by laced fingers.
That is, until the Council of Witches comes calling with news that the city Diviner has lost her powers, and the sisters suddenly find themselves being pulled in different directions. As Anne’s magic begins to develop beyond that of her sisters’, Beatrix’s writing attracts the attention of a publisher, and Violet is enchanted by the song of the circus—and perhaps a mischievous trapeze artist threatening to sweep her off her feet. It seems a family curse that threatens to separate the sisters is taking effect.
With dwindling time to rewrite their future and help three other witches challenge their own destinies, the Quigleys set out to bargain with Fate. But in focusing so closely on saving each other, will they lose sight of themselves?

My Review:

The Crescent Room Tearoom serves well-to-do ladies with considerably more than just tea from its turn-of-the-20th century location on Chicago’s bustling State Street, already the home of Marshall Field’s and Schlesinger & Mayer.

The Quigley sisters, Anne, Beatrice and Violet, serve slices of the future along with tea, pastries and finger sandwiches. They are witches, and they are all gifted with the ability to tell the future – just like their mother before them.

Like much of Chicago’s magical community, the Quigley sisters hide in plain sight, operating their tearoom just outside the edge of the city’s burgeoning magical district, dispensing true fortunes and sage advice under the guise of gossip, amusement and ladies’ fripperies.

Of course the magical community knows the truth about the Quigley sisters, the triplet daughters of the most gifted seer the Chicago Coven had seen in generations. A woman who gave up her place in the Coven to marry her mundane soulmate, knowing that their lives would end in tragedy.

Because her gift of seeing the future could also be a curse.

A curse that seems to have passed to the sisters now that they have grown up. Their joint operation of the tearoom has given them safety, security and companionship. At least until they discover that they are cursed to lose it all – and that it seems as if the leaders of the Chicago Coven are complicit in that curse.

Just as the curse drives a wedge in their contented companionship, setting them each on paths that pull them away from the shop and from each other, the Coven sets them three seemingly impossible tasks that must be met by an even more impossible deadline – or they will destroy the shop and cast the sisters out of the community.

It’s obviously a plot. If the curse doesn’t get them, the Coven will – and vice versa. Unless, like their parents loving but much too brief happiness, the curse is not really a curse after all.

Escape Rating A+: It’s the way that the whole, entire story does a complete heel turn that makes it work – because the story isn’t AT ALL what the reader thinks it’s going to be at the beginning.

First, I loved the setting. Chicago is still one of my favorite cities, and it’s always seemed magical to me. Part of the reason I loved the Dresden Files series so much – back in that day – was that Harry’s Chicago was ‘my’ Chicago, just with more magic. It’s also a part of what made Veronica Roth’s recent When Among Crows work so well, because it seemed just so downright likely that there’s a magical community hiding in plain sight.

Which is the case in The Crescent Moon Tearoom. This is definitely turn-of-the-last century Chicago, when State Street was already ‘that great street’. The gigantic downtown department stores were still new and celebrated and it was fun to read about Marshall Field’s back in that day, because the building is still something special a century plus later. (I had to look Schlesinger and Mayer up because the store didn’t last but the building did – as Carson, Pirie, Scott.)

Returning to the story – because it’s a wonderful story to return to – what I loved about The Crescent Moon Tearoom was the way that the reader is led down a primrose path, multiple times, making the reveal at the end just that much cozier and more heartwarming.

Because I have to admit that as the story was going along, I wasn’t all that sure about the cozy fantasy label. At first, it reminded me a LOT of Small Town, Big Magic, in that the heroine is cursed, her powers are gone, and the local coven leadership is manipulative to the max and evil to the core. And that’s at the point where the reader thinks the purpose of the story is to reveal the coven’s machinations and thwart their plot.

That it turns out to be entirely different – and much better, more heartwarming and considerably more interesting into the bargain – was the ending I stayed up until 4 in the morning for – and I’m so very glad that I did.

The Crescent Moon Tearoom is the author’s DEBUT novel, and it’s simply fantastic in all of the meanings of that word. The one and only, teeny-tiny, even slightly negative thing I could possibly say about it is that this book does not read like the first in a series. I could be wrong. I’d LOVE to be wrong. But even if I’m right about this book, I will absolutely be on the lookout for her next!

#BookReview: What We Sacrifice for Magic by Andrea Jo DeWerd

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: What We Sacrifice for Magic by Andrea Jo DeWerdWhat We Sacrifice for Magic by Andrea Jo DeWerd
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fantasy, relationship fiction, women's fiction
Pages: 304
Published by Alcove Press on September 24, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Perfect for fans of Practical Magic and The Lager Queen of Minnesota: a coming-of-age novel following three generations of witches in the 1960s, this enchanting and heartwarming debut explores the importance of family and the delight and heartbreak of discovering who you truly are.

It’s 1968, and the Watry-Ridder family is feared and respected in equal measure. The local farmers seek out their water charms, and the teenagers, their love spells. The family’s charms and spells, passed down through generations of witches descending from the Black Forest, have long served the small town of Friedrich, Minnesota.

Eldest daughter Elisabeth has just graduated high school—she is expected to hone her supernatural abilities to take over for her grandmother, the indomitable Magda. She’s also expected to marry her high school sweetheart and live the rest of her life in Friedrich. But all she can ask is, why her? Why is her path set in stone, and what else might be out there for her?

She soon discovers that magic isn’t the only thing inherited in her family. That magic also comes with a great price—and a big family secret. The more she digs, the more questions she has, and the less she trusts the grandmother she thought she knew. Who is Elisabeth without her family? She must ultimately decide what she’s willing to sacrifice for her family, for their secrets and their magic, or risk it all to pave her own way.

Navigating the bittersweet tension between self-discovery and living up to familial expectations, What We Sacrifice for Magic is a touching look at coming into one’s own.

My Review:

The Age of Aquarius might have dawned in the rest of the world, but 1968 in tiny Friedrich, Minnesota seemed like it would be no different from the year before, or the year after. The witches of the Watry-Ridder family had been doing their very best – and occasionally their damndest – to make sure that life in the town they held under their protection stayed protected and pretty much the same.

Helped by the fact that it was a teeny-tiny farming community and change came even slower to those sorts of towns than it did to the big cities – and a few well-placed memory charms helped with the rest.

But 1968 was the year that Elisabeth Watry-Rider graduated high school – and was expected to settle down in Friedrich, marry the boy she’d been dating for two years, and take up the reins of her family’s magical power – reins that had been firmly held in the iron grip of her grandmother Magda since long before Elisabeth was born.

No one has ever asked Elisabeth what she wants. Not that she hasn’t always enjoyed the attention of being Magda’s favorite, and not that she hasn’t pitied both her mother and her younger sister Mary, whose powers seem to be considerably less than her own.

As Elisabeth feels the walls closing in, she envies them both their freedom from the strait-jacket of the family legacy. She begins to ask questions about why she is the one who must give up all her freedom, while everyone around her has choices. Choices that the formidable Magda took from her when she was too young to even have a voice to protest with.

Before the bars of her prison of expectations clang shut for good, Elisabeth publicly defies her grandmother, accidentally sets fire to half the town, and flees into the night. Clawing out just a little tiny space of time to see who SHE wants to be when she grows up.

It’s the making of her – even as it breaks the back of her family and shatters the community’s faith in their powers. But some things are made to be broken, and some family secrets have to be exposed before the light of hope and possibility can have a chance to heal what’s – and who’s – been torn apart.

Escape Rating B: If Hazel Beck’s Witchlore and The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J. Ryan Stradel had a book baby, with Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic serving as either the midwife or the fairy godmother – or both – that book would be What We Sacrifice for Magic.

The title manages to tease the story without giving it away, and it’s a doozy but not in the way I expected, which leads back to those books I think contributed to its DNA.

Even though Lager Queen isn’t a book about magic, it is a story about family secrets and family rifts in a similar setting to What We Sacrifice for Magic with similar family dynamics. It’s a story about family traditions carried on by the women of the family, and the stresses and strains of a family heritage and business that is jealously guarded instead of shared.

Hazel Beck’s Witchlore and Ann Aguirre’s Fix-It Witches have similar witchy elements in that an older generation of witches is doing its damndest to control who gets power in ways that are detrimental to pretty much everyone involved – which is definitely paralleled by the story of What We Sacrifice for Magic.

The third element here – and one that didn’t get quite enough attention for this reader – is that late 1960s setting. The past is another country, they do things differently there, and that feels particularly true of the way things were before all of the social revolutions of the 1960s. The world was changing faster than small towns or formerly dominant institutions were able to keep up with – and Elisabeth’s coming of age felt like it was on the cusp of that but it wasn’t as much as this reader might have liked.

At its heart, this is a story about the family ties that bind and strangle, and the ballast of family expectations that may be great for the town but has turned out to be pretty catastrophic for the women who are supposed to bear its burdens. I felt for Elisabeth’s need to escape, I just found myself wishing that she hadn’t felt the need to take on so much guilt for having done so, and was glad to see the family start to heal when the dark secrets were finally exposed to the light.

Grade A #BookReview: Darkside by Michael Mammay

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: Darkside by Michael MammayDarkside (Planetside, #4) by Michael Mammay
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: military science fiction, science fiction, space opera
Series: Planetside #4
Pages: 336
Published by Harper Voyager on September 24, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In this thrilling, action-packed fourth installment in the Planetside series from acclaimed science fiction author Michael Mammay, retired Colonel Carl Butler gears up for another military investigation, full of danger, corporate intrigue, and tech people would kill for—perfect for fans of John Scalzi and Craig Alanson.
Colonel Butler has paid his dues and just wants to enjoy his retirement on a remote planet. But the galaxy has had other plans. He has been roped into searching for a politician’s missing son and an industry magnate’s missing daughter. He has been kidnapped, violated numerous laws, and caused the destruction of colonial facilities. He’s famous—or infamous, depending on who you ask—praised and reviled in equal measure across the galaxy for his exploits.
And he is determined to never let the government drag him into another investigation.
But when a runaway twelve-year-old girl whose father has gone missing asks him for help, well…it’s a lot harder to say no.
The girl’s father, Jorge Ramiro, was supposed to have been on Taug, a moon orbiting the gas giant Ridia 5, working on a dig with a famous archaeologist. But now there’s no sign of him and no record of him being there. Mining operations on the moon are run by two different consortiums, Caliber and Omicron—both of which have tried to kill Butler in the past. Butler doesn’t believe in coincidence.
Landing on Taug with his right-hand man Mac, computer genius Ganos, and an elite security squad, Butler soon finds that they’ve charged back into the crosshairs—because Ramiro is not the only who has disappeared, and the perpetual darkside of this moon is hiding more than the truth about a missing archeologist…

My Review:

Carl Butler has the worst best luck in universe. Or the other way around. He always gets his team out of whatever FUBAR situation he’s gotten them into. Then again, it’s a FUBAR situation that they’re in because FUBAR follows him around like a lost puppy that doesn’t seem to realize it’s already found a forever home.

Or, to put it the way that Butler’s ace hacker Ganos put it, “This is a Carl Butler operation. When is it not the worst-case scenario?”

Carl and company put themselves into this particular mess because an almost literal lost puppy – or at least a young girl with puppy dog eyes – has shown up on his rather remote doorstep.

He’s retired and he’s enjoying it. Dammit. At least that’s what Butler says, anyway.

But he can’t resist Eliza Ramiro and her crowdfunded campaign to hire him to find out what happened to her missing father. Based on her story, he’s pretty sure it’s going to be bad news. At 12, she’s old enough to know that as well.

Still, she needs to KNOW and not just assume. And he gets that. And he’s probably a bit bored – even if he’s trying to tell himself that he’s not.

His team knows he’s going as soon as Eliza tells her story. It just takes Carl a while to catch up. Which is fine because they are way ahead of him on planning this trip he says he doesn’t want to take – when they all know that he really does.

The problem that Butler discovers when he reaches the last place Jorge Ramiro was seen is that everyone on Taug is way, way ahead of him as well. Including not one but two interstellar mining corporations who have each done their damndest to kill Butler in the past – and are unlikely to have compunctions about doing so in the present.

Especially on a remote little moon where each corporation is sure that they control all the shots on the surface and all the lawyers and spin doctors they could possibly need to make sure that what happens on the darkside stays buried there forever.

Escape Rating A: I got caught up in Carl Butler’s (mis)adventures back in the first book in this series, Planetside, and I’ve been just as captivated by each of the subsequent “clusterf–ks” the man has somehow managed to get himself into, Spaceside and Colonyside. And now here we are on Darkside, literally the darkside of a moon. And it looks like Butler is going to leave this moon as the scapegoat for everything that happens – even the stuff that happened before he arrived – again.

Which seems to be his role in the universe. I wouldn’t say he’s exactly “OK” with that role, but he’s willing to accept it as long as the job gets done and he and his people get out more or less in the same number of pieces they started in. He’s honestly less invested in whether he, himself, gets out intact – but his team is VERY invested in THAT, in spite of himself.

What makes this book, and this whole series, work, is that it rides or dies – and does it ever ride – on the universe-weary voice of its protagonist, Colonel Carl Butler (ret.) Butler had and still has a reputation for getting the job done. At the same time, he had more than enough rank in the military to have gotten a good picture of how the universe’s sausage gets made. He’s pragmatic about pretty much everything except the fate of his team, and will bend ALL the rules to the point of breakage to take care of business.

He’s experienced enough and smart enough – when he lets himself take the time to BE smart – to understand how the levers of power get pulled – and to make sure that a realistic number of them get pulled in his favor whenever possible.

Above all, he’s loyal to his team – and they’re loyal to him. And that loyalty inspires others to be loyal as well. One of the things that he does very well, that shines as part of his personality, is the way that he does his best to bring out the best in everyone he works with.

He’s a good man who does some very bad things – but tries to mitigate the damage whenever he realistically can. Which doesn’t mean he isn’t perfectly willing to ream EVERYNONE involved in this CLUSTERF*** a new one. Then again, they deserve it. And we’re right there with him hoping that they all get exactly what they deserve.

At the top, I said that Carl Butler has the worst best luck in the universe. He’s actually not alone in that distinction. I was listening to Ghostdrift, coincidentally also the fourth book but in the Finder Chronicles, as I read Darkside, and Fergus Ferguson has pretty much the same kind of luck that Butler does. He’s a walking avatar for Murphy’s Law, he gets into the worst situations at the drop of a hat, everyone’s plans go straight to hell in his vicinity, but he somehow manages to survive and bring his team out intact. The two stories are both told in the first-person, and both characters have similar universe-weary voices which they each came by honestly although from different directions. Meaning that if you like one you’ll like the other. I certainly do.

Which means that I was thrilled to read in the author’s blog that he’s working on book 5 in this series and has started planning book 6. Wherever those stories take Butler and his team, I’ll be along for the ride.

#BookReview: One Big Happy Family by Susan Mallery

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> blog tours> book reviews
#BookReview: One Big Happy Family by Susan MalleryOne Big Happy Family by Susan Mallery
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, holiday romance, relationship fiction, women's fiction
Pages: 320
Published by Canary Street Press on October 1, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Please don’t come home for Christmas…
Julie Parker’s kids are her greatest gift. Still, she’s not exactly heartbroken when they ask to skip a big Christmas. Her son, Nick, is taking a belated honeymoon with his bride, Blair, while her daughter, Dana, will purge every reminder of the guy who dumped her. Again. Julie feels practically giddy for one-on-one holiday time with Heath, the (much) younger man she’s secretly dating.
But her plans go from cozy to chaotic when Nick and Dana plead for Christmas at the family cabin in memory of their late father, Julie’s ex. She can’t refuse, even though she dreads their reactions to her new man when they realize she’s been hiding him for months.
As the guest list grows in surprising ways, from Blair’s estranged mom to Heath’s precocious children, Julie’s secret is one of many to be unwrapped. Over this delightfully complicated and very funny Christmas, she’ll discover that more really is merrier, and that a big, happy family can become bigger and happier, if they let go of old hurts and open their hearts to love.

My Review:

That phrase is often said ironically, with a bit of a smirk instead of a smile, even an eye roll – as if somehow it’s a contradiction in terms like ‘jumbo shrimp’. When someone says “One big happy family” there’s usually a bit of a caveat to the ‘happy’ part. That something – or perhaps a whole lot of somethings or even someones – aren’t nearly as happy as things appear on the surface.

If they’re even bothering to pretend, that is.

But the Parker family is, at least, generally happy with each other – even if that’s leavened with just a bit of sadness this particular holiday as it’s their first without one of the family’s integral members. Julie Parker may have gotten over her marriage and her divorce from Eldon years ago, but he remained her friend and co-parent if not her spouse, and their adult children, Nick and Dana, miss him a LOT this first Christmas without him. The family holiday traditions just aren’t the same without him, because Eldon was really big on Christmas and he was at the center of a lot of those traditions.

Even if Julie was the person who put in the work to make them all happen. Which is the story of both her marriage AND her life. Julie gets things done, and isn’t good at relying on anyone else in the doing. The family Christmas traditions were a LOT of work – work that ALL fell on Julie’s strong but slightly tired shoulders.

She’s REALLY looking forward to this Christmas, a holiday where her big, generally happy, family is scattering to the four winds. She’s planning on two weeks of bliss and peace – not necessarily in that order – in the coziness of her own house WITH the boyfriend that she hasn’t told her kids about yet.

The only reason Julie has been keeping Heath a secret is that she’s much too worried about her family’s judgment of their relationship. Her kids know she’s dated in the decade plus since her divorce, and they’re fine with that. But she hasn’t let those relationships become serious enough to warrant the boyfriend meeting the family.

Heath is different. On paper, they match up well. Both divorced, both with two children, both owners of successful businesses, both strong and independent and capable. Heath’s a catch, and there’s no catch to the relationship, except for one thing that Julie can’t get out of her head. Heath is 42, and Julie is 54. There’s a lot of living between those twelve years, they are at different places in their lives, and people will judge them – because that’s what people do.

It may be a bigger problem in Julie’s mind than it is in the world at large or certainly among her family – but it is a real problem or at least it certainly can be.

Julie’s not sure their relationship is ready – or more to the point, that she is ready – to make Heath a part of her one big happy family. She’s happy to be able to put that off until after the holidays – possibly indefinitely.

Which is the point where all those plans refuse to survive first contact with the rest of that family, as Christmas turns into one last almighty grab at all their holiday traditions, all at once, with extra added family and a whole entire herd of drama llamas in tow.

Heath turns out to be more than willing to roll with all the punches. The question is whether Julie is, too.

Escape Rating B+: Julie’s issues over this family holiday are far, far, far from the only ones that rear their heads this holiday – but they are the ones that tugged at my heartstrings the most because they are oh so familiar and Julie is right, society will judge her relationship with a younger man. Some will judge harshly and some will say, “You go, girl!” but there will be judgment either way. And they are at different places in their lives and always will be – but that’s true of any couple with an age gap no matter which direction it goes – even if society usually glosses over those differences when the age gap is in the ‘expected’ direction.

But Julie and Heath’s issues together, along with Julie’s need to be in control and in charge at all times and not need anyone else, are not the only snow-covered hill to climb this holiday season. Every single member of this extended family has brought their very own, personal, drama llama to this Christmas feast.

The family isn’t entirely happy – as no family ever is all of the time – but there are a lot of them and the result is a lot of family dramas in a house with such wonderfully wonky acoustics that everyone can hear everything that happens everywhere outside of a closed door, even in a house big enough for SIX bedrooms and all the communal spaces that six bedrooms full of people might possibly need.

So it’s Julie and Heath, her son Nick, Nick’s wife Blair, the uncle who actually raised Blair AND her sourpuss of an estranged mother who didn’t – as well as Nick’s secret plans to NOT take over the family business after all. Julie’s daughter Dana and the man who keeps breaking her heart, over and over again – who is also Julie’s employee. Heath’s children, Madeline and Wyatt,who are ten and eight and no problem at all, but their mother, Heath’s ex Tiffany, got dumped for Christmas so Julie invites her, too. That’s not even everyone but it’s a bit past enough even before Julie ends up in the hospital after an accident.

All that’s missing is the partridge in the pear tree!

I love a good age gap romance – particularly when the woman is the older half of that relationship – when it’s done right. Which it very much is in One Big Happy Family. Howsomever, as an only child myself, the sheer number of family members and the craziness each of them brought to the holiday table – simultaneously – was the stuff of which nightmares are made. I found plenty to empathize with in most of their relationships – but I also found myself wishing there was one less of them – although I recognize that’s a ‘me’ thing and may not be a ‘you’ thing and your reading mileage may definitely vary.

All in all, if you’re looking for a happy ever after portrait of a chaotic family holiday with a family that loves each other completely and is going to stick together no matter what and get through this mess, One Big Happy Family does turn out to be a charming holiday portrait of, in the end, really, truly, one big happy family.

A- #BookReview: The Restaurant of Lost Recipes by Hisashi Kashiwai, translated by Jesse Kirkwood

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: The Restaurant of Lost Recipes by Hisashi Kashiwai, translated by Jesse KirkwoodThe Restaurant of Lost Recipes (Kamogawa Food Detectives, #2) by Hisashi Kashiwai, Jesse Kirkwood
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy mystery, foodie fiction, literary fiction, magical realism, translated fiction, world literature
Series: Kamogawa Food Detectives #2
Pages: 224
Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on October 8, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The Restaurant of Lost Recipes is the second book in the bestselling, mouth-watering Kamogawa Food Detectives series, for fans of Before the Coffee Gets Cold.
We all hold lost recipes in our hearts. A very special restaurant in Kyoto helps recreate them...
Chef Nagare and his daughter Koishi serve their customers more than delicious food at their Kamogawa Diner down a quiet street in Kyoto. They can help recreate meals from their customers’ most treasured memories. Through ingenious investigations, these “food detectives” untangle flavors and pore through old shopping lists to remake unique dishes from the past.
From the swimmer who misses his father’s lunchbox to the model who longs for fried rice from her childhood, each customer leaves the diner forever changed—though not always in the ways they expect…
A beloved bestseller in Japan, The Restaurant of Lost Recipes is a tender and healing novel that celebrates the power of community and delicious food.

My Review:

The premise of this series is simple, beautiful and TRUE in all the best ways.

Hunger may be the best sauce, but nostalgia comes a close second. The difference is that hunger makes everything taste better – while nostalgia can only be satisfied by the correct combination of flavors and smells. The one that takes us back to the original that we remember so fondly and are able to reproduce so rarely.

It’s that reproduction – and the memories that come along with it – that makes this series both fascinating and heartwarming.

The Kamogawa Food Detectives are Chef Nagare and his adult daughter Koishi. Their little hole in the wall restaurant in Kyoto is a place that only the locals know. There’s no sign outside and they do almost no advertising. What little advertising they do isn’t even about the restaurant.

Their one line ad in a gourmet magazine proclaims, “We Find Your Food!”, which is exactly what they do. The clients for their food detection service come because they are desperate to recreate a taste – and the feelings that go along with it – that they barely remember but can’t let go of.

That they succeed isn’t magic – but it is. All it takes is a story and a fading memory and a whole lot of detection on the part of Chef Nagare – as well as a whole lot of taste-testing on the part of Koishi – to recreate just what the client has been searching for.

Each case – each story – is just a bit different. The process is the same, but the results are as variable as the clientele. Along the way, linking the separate vignettes into a harmonious whole, is the story of Nagare and Koishi, their banter, their gentle teasing, their excellent father-daughter relationship – and the way they include the missing member of their family, Nagare’s late wife Kikuko – in a way that demonstrates love and care and gentle grief and moving on all at the same time.

There may not be magic in the fantasy or magical realism sense in this book or this series, but the story is absolutely magical all the same.

Escape Rating A-: This is the series that got me firmly hooked on these cozy mystery/fantasy/magical realism type stories (the ones that trace their origin inspiration to Before the Coffee Gets Cold). After devouring this book in one sitting, I’m now certain that this is my favorite of them all in spite of the fact that nearly all of the others, there’s not even a hint of any actual magic.

It still seems like magic, but I think that magic can be put down to two factors – or at least this is how it’s working for me. One factor is the background story, the relationship between Nagare and his adult daughter Koishi and that it does work. Their relationship is just plain good in a way that seems magical because I honestly can’t imagine ever living with my parents as an adult and having them actually treat me as a functional adult. We weren’t that fortunate – although Koishi is.

We don’t get a lot of their daily lives in the spaces between their customers’ stories, but the bits we do get seem to be building on each other in a way that I simply find charming and heartwarming and I hope that other readers do as well.

As much as I enjoy the individual customers’ stories, Nagare and Koishi are the people carrying the story overall, and the other part of what I love is that the ‘magic’ of their food detective business comes down to good interview techniques on Koishi’s part, good investigative skills on Nagare’s part, a willingness to chase down any clue as well as, of course, Nagare’s skill in the kitchen and his willingness to experiment as often as it takes to get the dish exactly right.

The stories wouldn’t be half as much fun if they could just snap their fingers and make it happen. The breathless anticipation on the part of the customer – and the nervous worry on the part of the chef and the detective – make each customer’s story really pay off for both them AND the reader.

I do enjoy the individual stories, but without Nagare and Koishi to tie it all together the books wouldn’t work nearly as well, at least for this reader.

I’ll admit that I’ve been salivating for this book since the minute I finished the first book in the series, The Kamogawa Food Detectives. I mean that both literally and figuratively, as the food described within both stories as well as their presentation is absolutely mouth-watering. So don’t go into this series hungry. I mean it! You have been warned!

IMHO, this was totally worth the wait. I loved it and ate it up in one sitting. I’m just happy that there are several more books in the series in the original Japanese, so I have hopes that more will be translated – preferably as soon as possible!

#BookReview: Murder at King’s Crossing by Andrea Penrose

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Murder at King’s Crossing by Andrea PenroseMurder at King’s Crossing (Wrexford & Sloane, #8) by Andrea Penrose
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Wrexford & Sloane #8
Pages: 368
Published by Kensington on September 24, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

For fans of Miss Scarlet and the Duke and Bridgerton—a masterfully plotted mystery that combines engaging protagonists with rich historical detail and “an unusually rich look at Regency life,” (Publishers Weekly), plus a touch of romance that readers of Amanda Quick and Deanna Raybourn will savor.
Celebration is in the air at Wrexford and Charlotte’s country estate as they host the nuptials of their friends, Christopher Sheffield and Lady Cordelia Mansfield. But on the afternoon of the wedding, the festivities are interrupted when the local authorities arrive with news that a murdered man has been discovered at the bridge over King’s Crossing, his only identification an invitation to the wedding. Lady Cordelia is horrified when the victim is identified as Jasper Milton, her childhood friend and a brilliant engineer who is rumored to have discovered a revolutionary technological innovation in bridge design. That he had the invitation meant for her cousin Oliver, who never showed up for the wedding, stirs a number of unsettling questions.
Both men were involved in the Revolutions-Per-Minute Society, a scientific group dedicated to making radical improvements in the speed and cost of transportation throughout Britain. Is someone plotting to steal Milton’s designs? And why has her cousin disappeared?
Wrexford and Charlotte were looking forward to spending a peaceful interlude in the country, but when Lady Cordelia resolves to solve the mystery, they offer their help, along with that of the Weasels and their unconventional inner circle of friends. The investigation turns tangled and soon all of them are caught up in a treacherous web of greed, ambition, and dangerous secrets. And when the trail takes a shocking turn, Wrexford and Charlotte must decide what risks they are willing to take with their family to bring the villains to justice . . .

My Review:

The difference between “I’ve got a bridge to sell you” and “I’ve got revolutionary plans for building bridges to sell you” should be the width of a chasm – but it’s not nearly as far as one would expect in this latest entry in the Wrexford & Sloane Regency mystery series, after last year’s Murder at the Merton Library and the previous year’s Murder at the Serpentine Bridge.

There we go, bridges again! This one is pretty much bridges and bodies all the way down – with the occasional added Bonaparte. Not that Bonaparte is personally on the scene, but rather that this story takes place towards the end of his first brief exile. (Wrexford and company do not, as this story takes place, know precisely when that exile will end, but the handwriting was most definitely on the wall.)

The story begins when tragedy strikes in the midst of celebration. Wrexford and Sloane’s best friends, ‘Kit’ Sheffield and Lady Cordelia, finally tie their own marital knot at Wrex’s country estate. The celebration is intended to be small, close friends and family only, but one guest – or perhaps two guests – are missing, depending on how one counts. One is Lady Cordelia’s cousin Oliver Carrick and the other, Jasper Milton, is one of the dear friends who helped her sneak into mathematics lectures at Cambridge in male disguise.

Her happiness is dimmed when her friend’s body is found with her cousin’s wedding invitation as his only identification, putting her missing cousin in the frame for the murder.

And that’s where the bridges come in and cross the entire case. Her friend Milton had been hinting about a revolutionary new design that would allow bridges to be built in areas where it had been formerly considered impossible. If true and practical – and most likely yes to both because Milton truly was a genius – it would allow the new railroads to reach smaller and more remote towns. In turn, this would allow working class people to move to where their labor was needed instead of being stuck where they were born – and practically trapped.

There’s a lot of money to be made with Milton’s last designs – if they can be found. There’s also the potential for a lot of radical upheaval if those designs come to fruition – both at home and abroad.

Milton’s friends seem to be doing their damndest to place the frame for his murder around Cordelia’s cousin Oliver. At least until they start dropping like flies in their turn, at times and places where Oliver has an ironclad alibi. And yet, as far as Wrexford is concerned – and in spite of Cordelia’s hopes and fears – Oliver’s behavior makes him look guilty as sin.

There are too many in pursuit of those plans, muddying the waters and adding to the body count. Time is running out for Wrexford and Sloane to figure out who really ‘done’ it before the noose closes around the wrong neck. Or necks. Or their own.

Escape Rating B: It took the longest time for this particular entry in the series to grab me. Once it finally did, I was hooked again, but it took longer than usual. It was probably a combination of not being quite the right book at the right time, the domesticity of the early scenes (which I love but not quite so thoroughly front-loaded) AND the fact that the characters were flailing around to get even a glimpse of a direction for a bit longer than is usual for this generally über-competent crew.

Not that they were not trying – just that someone in the mix was deliberately obfuscating the situation and the clues were thin on the ground to begin with – in part because of the aforementioned malign, obfuscatory influence.

So this particular entry in the series had a LOT of plot threads going on, threw out a barrel of red herrings, and it took a fair bit of the book for those herrings to get re-gathered into the proper nets. Howsomever, as much as the process of getting there drove me a bit batty, the actual solution was priceless in the manner of those old MasterCard commercials.

Where this story was lovely was in the way that the relationships among the members of this extended found family continued to grow and deepen. Not just that Kit and Cordelia finally tied the knot, but also that the Weasels are both growing in number and growing up, which should provide plenty of family drama for future entries in the series.

Which I’m very pleased to say will be at least three more as the author has announced on her blog that she’s recently been contracted to continue the series with three more adventures. So I have hope that this time next year Wrexford & Sloane will be back!

A- #BookReview: Fear the Flames by Olivia Rose Darling

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: Fear the Flames by Olivia Rose DarlingFear the Flames (Fear the Flames, #1) by Olivia Rose Darling
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy, fantasy romance, romantasy
Series: Fear the Flames #1
Pages: 384
Published by Delacorte Press on September 17, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

An exiled princess teams up with the last man she thought she could trust in the start of a dazzling and unforgettable epic fantasy romance series.As a child, Elowen Atarah was ripped away from her dragons and imprisoned by her father, King Garrick of Imirath. Years later, Elowen is now a woman determined to free her dragons. Having established a secret kingdom of her own called Aestilian, she’s ready to do what’s necessary to save her people and seek vengeance. Even if that means having to align herself with the Commander of Vareveth, Cayden Veles, the most feared and dangerous man in all the kingdoms of Ravaryn.
Cayden is ruthless, lethal, and secretive, promising to help Elowen if she will stand with him and all of Vareveth in the pending war against Imirath. Despite their contrasting motives, Elowen can’t ignore their undeniable attraction as they combine their efforts and plot to infiltrate the impenetrable castle of Imirath to steal back her dragons and seek revenge on their common enemy.
As the world tries to keep them apart, the pull between Elowen and Cayden becomes impossible to resist. Working together with their crew over clandestine schemes, the threat of war looms, making the imminent heist to free her dragons their most dangerous adventure yet. But for Elowen, her vengeance is a promise signed in blood, and she’ll stop at nothing to see that promise through.
An immersive fantasy filled with a sizzling reluctant-allies-to-lovers romance, a world to get lost in, dangerous quests, dragon bonds, and an entertaining band of characters to root for, Fear the Flames marks the stunning debut of Olivia Rose Darling.

My Review:

Historically and fictionally speaking, there seem to be two types of prophecies. Some prophecies are vague and mysterious and mysteriously vague – think of Nostradamus – and resemble 20/20 hindsight, in that they are only able to be interpreted after the fact – which one would think would be a bit beside the point by that point!

Then there’s the other kind, the prophecies that seem really specific – which they kind of are. But they’re specific because they are self-fulfilling. The classic example is Oedipus Rex. The poor man was prophesied to kill his father and marry his mother – but it only comes about because dear old dad tries to prevent it from coming about. There’s also that truly dreadful prophecy about Harry Potter and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named that totally and utterly derails Potter’s whole, entire life.

I’d say I’m digressing but I’m actually not, because Princess Elowen of Imirath’s life was thrown into an equal and equally painful amount of chaos and destruction by an equally terrible prophecy that was brought about by the direct actions of her very own dear old dad attempting to thwart it.

At the celebration of her first birthday, Elowen was gifted with a quintet of dragon eggs. The eggs were positively ancient and assumed to be merely curious fossils at this point in their long existence.

But we wouldn’t have a story if that were true – so of course it’s not. The eggs hatch into not one or two but FIVE baby dragons who instantly imprint on and bond with the equally tiny princess. The prophecy that goes along with the event foretells that the bond between the little princess and her dragons will either doom her country, or bring it to even greater heights of glory – and nothing in either of those fates says anything about the fate of her father, the man who currently sits on the throne of Imirath. Whether doom or glory is coming – he seems to have no part in it at all.

Out of fear and jealousy, to save his country and his throne – or so he believes – King Garrick of Imirath, little Elowen’s father – does his absolute worst to thwart the prophecy. He should have known better.

Fear the Flames is the story of more-than-once-beaten and bloodied Princess Elowen coming home to deliver a brutal lesson that she’s spent her entire life preparing. In many stories, revenge is a dish best served cold, but for Elowen, the only way to achieve both justice and vengeance is in a blast of dragon fire.

Escape Rating A-: Romantasy as a genre, like its sister from another mister Science Fiction Romance, has to straddle the line between its two genres and has to dig itself deeply into that fence line to the point where its feet touch the ground on both sides. Which, all too often, ends up with splinters in some VERY uncomfortable places – even when it’s successful at that endeavor.

Which is pretty much the case in Fear the Flames. I have a couple of tiny quibbles, but for the most part Fear the Flames works and it works well. From my own personal perspective, it seemed that although it does successfully straddle that line between fantasy and romance, the foot on the romance side of the equation is just a bit more firmly planted. Your reading mileage, of course, may vary. I certainly found it impossible to put down!

The Elowen we meet at the beginning of her story is the product of long years of torture and darkness at the hands of her father and his henchmen – as well as a daring and desperate escape. She’s reached adulthood as queen, not of her birthright Imirath, but of the tiny hidden kingdom of Aestilian. But her little kingdom is a refuge for many fleeing from her father’s increasing tyranny, and with each new immigrant comes greater danger of either discovery or simple starvation. Or both.

To protect her people, Elowen leaves her kingdom to forge an alliance with neighboring Vareveth, seemingly in a case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend as the hand of Imirath’s tyranny stretches further each year.

All of the above is political, and very. Just the kind of epic political warfare that epic fantasy is known for. Elowen’s rise from prisoner to power has the shadows of grimdarkness looming over it in the grandest of style.

And then there’s the romance, a fantastic – in more ways than one – story of enemies to lovers, with all the steamy intensity of forbidden passion and ringed round with the spikes and thorns of an epic betrayal.

That all of this – and it’s compelling pretty much every step of the way – is just the beginning of a truly sweeping story of love and revenge will leave readers panting for more. Which they’ll get in Wrath of the Dragons, coming not nearly soon enough in 2025.

A- #BookReview: Queen Macbeth by Val McDermid

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: Queen Macbeth by Val McDermidQueen Macbeth by Val McDermid
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, retellings, Scottish history
Series: Darkland Tales #5
Pages: 144
Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on September 24, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Shakespeare fed us the myth of the Macbeths as murderous conspirators. But now Val McDermid drags the truth out of the shadows, exposing the patriarchal prejudices of history. Expect the unexpected . . .
A thousand years ago in an ancient Scottish landscape, a woman is on the run with her three companions – a healer, a weaver and a seer. The men hunting her will kill her – because she is the only one who stands between them and their violent ambition. She is no lady: she is the first queen of Scotland, married to a king called Macbeth.
As the net closes in, we discover a tale of passion, forced marriage, bloody massacre and the harsh realities of medieval Scotland. At the heart of it is one strong, charismatic woman, who survived loss and jeopardy to outwit the endless plotting of a string of ruthless and power-hungry men. Her struggle won her a country. But now it could cost her life.

My Review:

Shakespeare, for the most part, did an excellent job of writing stories that made an indelible imprint on the public consciousness – and still do. It’s pretty much impossible to hear the name “Macbeth” and not think of the version of both the title character AND his lady as ambitious traitors and multiple murderers driven by supernatural forces and haunted by ghosts.

Just as it’s nearly impossible to think of Richard III without having Shakespeare’s portrayal of an evil mastermind who killed his nephews and lost his crown – in spite of the evidence that has come to light refuting nearly all of it.

Shakespeare’s stories are just better, and considerably more memorable than the actual tales that history tells. Whoever he was, he was damn good at his job. Part of which was to please the powers-that-be of his day, so that his plays could continue to be produced and performed – and so that he could keep himself out of prison and his head attached to his shoulders.

Which is where the genesis of many of Shakespeare’s historical plays, including both of the above, comes in. Just as Richard III was a real, historical figure in English history, so too was Macbeth a real, historical figure of Scottish history.

A figure about whom little is known, because the historical Macbeth lived in the early to mid-11th century and there isn’t much in the historic record. Probably something to do with that being the historical period known as “The Dark Ages”.

Shakespeare lived, and wrote, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, nearly 600 years later. He based many of his historical plays on Holinshed’s Chronicles, a famous – but later considered infamously inaccurate – ‘comprehensive’ history that was published in Shakespeare’s time.

In other words, Shakespeare made a lot of things up, and a lot of the things he didn’t make up were based on the things that Holinshed made up.

Which is precisely where this retelling of the Macbeth story comes in, told not from Macbeth’s perspective or even featuring Macbeth as the central character, but instead told from the perspective of Gruoch, Macbeth’s, ‘lady’, or more historically correct, his ‘queen’.

Although, as seen from this point of view, it seems that Gruoch may have been the prime mover of events after all, with the help of her own coven of ‘witches’. Which may explain precisely why Shakespeare reduced her to a secondary character – and a villainous one at that.

Escape Rating A-: I picked up Queen Macbeth because this is the second retelling of the Macbeth story from Gruoch’s perspective, set in something much closer to the historical context, to be published this year. The other being Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid.

While the two books come out of very similar premises, they surprisingly don’t resemble each other at all. Lady Macbeth leans quite a bit on the supernatural/paranormal potential that derives from Shakespeare’s version, with family curses and chained witches and imprisoned seers – with a dragon lover as Gruoch’s reward for dealing with Macbeth. Her version makes Macbeth the villain and Gruoch a victim who finally takes matters into her own hands.

This version, Queen Macbeth (which I personally liked a bit better), hews closer to what is known about the historical figures and the original time period. Gruoch and her ladies are always in danger of being called out as witches, but their witchcraft is of the herbal, medicinal and occasionally poisonous variety. One seems to have visions of the future that often, but not always, come true – but that’s as far as the supernatural element seems to go.

Mostly, it’s that Gruoch and her women are intelligent, educated and independent, and as is known from the witch trials of centuries later, that’s was often all it took for women to be condemned as ‘unnatural’ and in league with the forces of evil.

The story of this Gruoch and her Macbeth tells a story of political machinations, true partnership and enduring romance – even as it includes a happy ever after, of a sort, that is plausible based on what is known but unlikely – and makes for a satisfying, if somewhat open ended, conclusion for the reader.

Howsomever, as little as this version of the Macbeth story owes to Shakespeare, in the reading of it it seems to owe considerably more to a different chronicler. Specifically, this reader at least saw a lot of resemblance to Guinevere’s story in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (The Death of Arthur). Although, again, with a considerably happier ending, if only because there’s neither a Lancelot or a Mordred to mess things up.

I’m aware that I keep talking ‘around’ this story instead of ‘about’ this story because a) it’s not exactly new, it’s part of the literary trend of telling classic stories from a female perspective that was popularized by Madeline Miller’s Circe a few years back, and 2) the circumstances that surround this particular participant in that trend grabbed me more than the story itself. A fascination that only grew when I learned that this book is the latest in a series of Darkland Tales, which reexamine and even re-imagine some of the darkest chapters of Scottish history by 21st century writers. The other stories in this series so far, Rizzio by Denise Mina, Hex by Jenni Fagan, Nothing Left to Fear from Hell by Alan Warner, and Columba’s Bones by David Greig, all intrigue me, but particularly Rizzio with its connections to the court of Mary, Queen of Scots.

They all look like stories to turn to on a dark and stormy night, and I plan to do exactly that when the mood strikes.

Grade A #AudioBookReview: Graveyard Shift by M.L. Rio

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Grade A #AudioBookReview: Graveyard Shift by M.L. RioGraveyard Shift by M.L. Rio
Narrator: Jess Nahikian, Max Meyers, Si Chen, Susan Dalian, Tim Campbell
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Gothic, horror, mystery, thriller
Pages: 144
Length: 3 hours and 9 minutes
Published by Flatiron Books, Macmillan Audio on September 24, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Author of sales sensation If We Were Villains returns with a story about a ragtag group of night shift workers who meet in the local cemetery to unearth the secrets lurking in an open grave.
Every night, in the college’s ancient cemetery, five people cross paths as they work the late shift: a bartender, a rideshare driver, a hotel receptionist, the steward of the derelict church that looms over them, and the editor-in-chief of the college paper, always in search of a story.
One dark October evening in the defunct churchyard, they find a hole that wasn’t there before. A fresh, open grave where no grave should be. But who dug it, and for whom?
Before they go their separate ways, the gravedigger returns. As they trail him through the night, they realize he may be the key to a string of strange happenings around town that have made headlines for the last few weeks—and that they may be closer to the mystery than they thought.
Atmospheric and eerie, with the ensemble cast her fans love and a delightfully familiar academic backdrop, Graveyard Shift is a modern Gothic tale in If We Were Villains author M. L. Rio’s inimitable style.

My Review:

I almost saved this one for Halloween, because it’s just the kind of horror-adjacent book that I love to pick for spooky season. But it’s out this week – and I simply didn’t want to wait that long!

Even though this particular “graveyard shift” takes place in an actual graveyard, the story doesn’t start out all that creepy. Unhealthy, maybe, but not creepy.

The ‘Anchorites’ are a group of insomniacs who meet up at midnight in a graveyard for a quick smoke. The ancient but historically significant cemetery and the church it’s attached to just happen to be the only location in the middle of a busy college campus that is the requisite distance from ALL of the various campus entrances. It’s the only place where it’s OK to smoke that anyone attached to the campus can reach during the length of a typical work break.

Two of the ‘Anchorites’ hang around because they work an actual night shift. Theo, the manager at a nearby bar, and Tamar, working her second job as a hotel night desk manager. Edie, the editor-in-chief of the college newspaper, is too stressed out hunting for the paper’s next story to sleep. Tuck, a washed-out grad student with no place to go, is squatting in that derelict church and can’t resist the temporary camaraderie. Hannah, a rideshare driver, has had chronic insomnia for so long that she doesn’t seem to sleep at all.

The graveyard hasn’t been used – except by desperate smokers – in at least a century. They’re safe smoking in the middle of campus in the middle of the night. Or so they assume.

Until the night when they arrive for their not-exactly-arranged, never-truly-spoken-about, midnight rendezvous – and discover a freshly dug grave in the middle of their usual meeting place. Led by editor-in-chief Edie, they can’t resist speculating about whodunnit? Or perhaps this time it should be ‘who dug it?’

A question that gets answered when the gravedigger comes back, dumps a load of dead lab rats in the grave and covers it over – while they collectively hide all around and watch.

This game really is afoot – and so is one escaped lab rat making a literal meal out of one of the petrified Anchorites.

From there the story is off to a surprisingly twisted race, as Edie sees a story that might win her and her paper a prestigious award, Tamar sees a chance to use her library degree and her research talents for something other than merely checking in hotel guests or checking out books, Tuck sees an opportunity to use his experience with scientific laboratories and his knowledge of mycology to investigate a rogue project, while Theo sees a way to help the only friends he has. Hannah, however, seeks revenge on the people who gave her hope – and then snatched it away.

What they’re going to get is likely to be considerably more than any of them imagined, for good and definitely for ill.

Escape Rating A: Graveyard Shift wasn’t at all what I was expecting – it was better! It’s not really horror, although very Gothic in tone in spite of its contemporary setting, at least until the very, very end where the reader is left wondering – as are a couple of the characters.

But as it goes, it sucks the reader – or listener in my case – into this story, every bit as much as the ‘Anchorites’ get sucked into following Edie in pursuit of the potential newspaper story.

That story is told as snippets of the night, each slice of time from a different character’s point of view. This worked even better in the audio, as the five characters are voiced by five different narrators. (Insert here my usual rant at the lack of information about who voiced whom. As a group, Jess Nahikian, Max Meyers, Si Chen, Susan Dalian and Tim Campbell did a fantastic job but I very much wish I knew who voiced which part.)

One of the things that makes this story so riveting is the way that the tension seems to build almost minute by minute – and how we’re inside each character’s head as they experience their particular slice of that tightening noose. Particularly as the investigation continues feverishly through the single night of the story, and the identity of the person or persons who are about to get hung out to dry – figuratively if not literally – zeroes in on the real target.

Even as the group of investigators gets deeper and deeper into their own personal fog of jittery exhaustion.

I got caught up in this story in multiple ways. I always love a good story about an investigation – and this was definitely that. While Edie, the editor is at first idly speculating, she does have the threads of a big scoop in her hands – even if her moral compass has been knocked more than a bit askew after chasing stories for so long. There is something rotten going on, and it needs to be brought out into the light.

The ‘Anchorites’ as a group are fascinating, and part of that fascination is in their unacknowledged interconnectedness. They ARE friends, but they are each so used to being friendLESS that they’re pretty much incapable of acknowledging that fact. The way the telling of the story bounced from one to the other keeps the story hopping and the reader on their toes.

That the guilty parties got their comeuppance in the end was absolutely righteous, and the way that the story ended with just that shivery touch of frightening possibility made for the icing on a deliciously creepy horror-adjacent, Halloween-anticipatory reading cake. I’ll certainly be looking for the author’s next book, Hot Wax, when it comes out in January.

A- #BookReview: The Banned Books Club by Brenda Novak

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> blog tours> book reviews
A- #BookReview: The Banned Books Club by Brenda NovakThe Banned Books Club by Brenda Novak
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: books and reading, relationship fiction, women's fiction
Pages: 352
Published by Mira on September 17, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

She left her hometown following a scandal—but family loyalty is dragging her back…
Despite their strained relationship, when Gia Rossi’s sister, Margot, begs her to come home to Wakefield, Iowa, to help with their ailing mother, Gia knows she has no choice. After her rebellious and at-times-tumultuous teen years, Gia left town with little reason to look back. But she knows Margot’s borne the brunt of their mother’s care and now it’s Gia’s turn to help, even if it means opening old wounds.
As expected, Gia’s homecoming is far from welcome. There’s the Banned Books Club she started after the PTA overzealously slashed the high school reading list, which is right where she left it. But there is also Mr. Hart, her former favorite teacher. The one who was fired after Gia publicly and painfully accused him of sexual misconduct. The one who prompted Gia to leave behind a very conflicted town the minute she turned eighteen. The one person she hoped never to see again.
When Margot leaves town without explanation, Gia sees the cracks in her sister’s “perfect” life for the first time and plans to offer support. But as the town, including members of the book club, takes sides between Gia and Mr. Hart, everything gets harder. Fortunately, she learns that there are people she can depend on. And by standing up for the truth, she finds love and a future in the town she thought had rejected her.

My Review:

I picked this book for today because Sunday is the official start of Banned Books Week, but the blog tour ends Saturday so this was as close as I could get. So here we are. Or rather, there Gia Rossi is, back home in Wakefield, Iowa. Pretty much the last place on Earth she wants to be.

There isn’t exactly an actual Banned Books Club in this book, but once upon a time, back when Gia and her sister Margot were in high school, there was. Before all the shit hit all the fans in town, and Gia left and tried her damndest not to look back.

However, it could be said, and it would be absolutely true, that everything that happens in this book, even though it takes place nearly 20 years later, is a ripple effect of that long ago club.

Gia started the club because she was seemingly a natural-born iconoclast, a person who never met a windmill she didn’t want to tilt at, someone who, when told by her parents and everyone around her explicitly NOT to make waves, would make the biggest waves she could manage to churn up.

Her high school banned The Catcher in the Rye, The Outsiders and The Handmaid’s Tale from the Honors English reading list. Not that this happened officially, exactly. The PTA browbeat the teacher, who was the head of the English department, into dropping the books. That teacher, Mr. Hart, didn’t stand up for either the books or the students.

If Gia had been a bit older – or a bit more cynical – she would have seen that as a sign. But she wasn’t and she didn’t and thereby hangs half this tale.

But only half because this isn’t just Gia’s story. It’s the story of both Gia and her sister Margot. The rule breaker and the rule follower. The wild child and the golden. The one who left – with the town practically lighting her way with torches and pitchforks – and the one who stayed and did everything she thought she was supposed to do.

Until their mother was diagnosed with cancer and both of their houses of cards came tumbling down.

Escape Rating A-: As I said at the top, this isn’t really a story about that high school banned books club. Very much on the other hand, this is a book that in certain ways fits right in with the kind of books that have been banned.

It tells not just one but two stories that make people uncomfortable – which is what really lies behind all of the book bannings. (Purported reasons for that discomfort certainly vary – but the fact of the discomfort remains the same) The three books that were removed from Gia’s high school reading list have all been repeated targets of challenges and bans for the past 30 years if not longer.

The Banned Books Club combines two stories that make people uncomfortable, stories that some people would prefer not to read about. Gia’s story is about her sexual molestation at the hands of a teacher – and the way that the town divided among itself in the aftermath and literally makes it psychologically damaging for her to remain.

Margot’s story is about domestic abuse. Her angry, controlling husband hasn’t hit her – yet – but the emotional and psychological abuse he dishes out with every breath is even more damaging. But he’s good buddies with the local cops – to the point where they turn a blind eye to his harassment. Even though by this point his wife has fled so he’s not harassing her – his harassment to the point of vandalism is directed at his wife’s family – including her cancer-stricken mother – after Margot flees.

(While some readers may be thinking that the themes of this book are considered fairly tame stuff today and are common plots in women’s fiction, it’s fair to say that some will view Gia’s story as “woke” because the (very young) woman was believed instead of the male authority figure. Margot’s story could also be condemned because it challenges the integrity of the “thin blue line”, and because there’s suddenly a whole lot of nostalgia for the 1950s when divorces were considerably fewer because women had no other options – going all the way to the point where the idea that women should remain even in violent marriages is getting a lot of airplay these days.)

Neither of their stories make for light reading, but they are both important as they are stories about standing up for oneself in spite of the still, small voice in the back of many of our heads telling us not to rock the boat, that things could always be worse.

So, as a book, I found both Gia’s and Margot’s not exactly fun to read but compelling in the way that each of them worked out a way forwards – no matter how desperate in Margot’s case. However, she planned expertly in spite of her many, justified fears and executed that plan brilliantly – and I always give points for competence especially in desperate situations.

In the end, I did feel like there was a lot of unpleasant crap in the family dynamics between Gia and Margot and between the sisters and their parents that contributed to pretty much everything – especially the way that Gia left town and stayed virtually gone for nearly two decades. Those issues didn’t so much get resolved as swept under the rug in the wake of their mother’s death. Which is exactly what families do, but it left this reader feeling like there was a bit of a loose end that I’d like to have seen resolved – or at least acknowledged – before the end.

But I did like that Gia decides to move back to Wakefield and open a bookstore – a store she plans to name, of course and fittingly for a happy ending that brings the story around full circle, the Banned Books Shoppe. A place where banned books will be loved and recommended, bought and sold, available and read, but never, ever banned!