altlovesbooks

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.