altlovesbooks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DNF @ 10%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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