altlovesbooks

As I listened to this book, I kept hopping between 5 stars for the writing and 3 stars for the story. I ultimately decided that good writing doesn't save a disjointed story, but I wish I could have rated this one higher for the writing alone.

Alma Cruz is a writer of untold stories -- that is, despite being a writer of some renown, she still has bits of stories unfinished and unpublished that she feels compelled to put to rest. Rather than shove them in a shoebox and hide them in a closet, she constructs a literal graveyard for her finished stories on some inherited land in the Dominican Republic. She hires Filomena as her groundskeeper to maintain the land in her absences, and tells her to stop and listen to each story once a day. So, while keeping the grounds clear and maintaining the sculpted headstones, she starts pausing at one grave a day, and to her astonishment, she starts hearing these characters' stories. Not the incomplete snippets Alma wrote, but entire family stories involving intrigue, romance, infidelity, and death.

There's so many POVs in this book. Alma. Filomena. The characters from Alma's books (primarily Bienvenida and Manuel). Side characters sometimes get a chapter. We hop back and forth between characters in the present and in the past, making things feel very fragmented. There's a lot going on backstory-wise amongst everyone, but you really have to be good at keeping stories straight to stay oriented in this book. Despite all this, the prose is fantastic, and honestly was what kept me going throughout the book.

Great prose but too many POVs and too much to keep track of for me to rate much higher.

Hey, did you like Pachinko (more than me)? Are you keen on multigenerational Asian historical fiction? Like great writing? This one's for you, then.

Meilin is newly married in 1938, but with war headed their way her future is uncertain. With only her son Renshu, a beautiful hand painted scroll, and what little they can throw together, they're forced to flee an oncoming Japanese army. Renshu is raised on tales Meilin tells from the scroll, as together they make new lives for themselves over and over again as they're forced to flee again and again from places they try and start fresh in. As Meilin's story in Taiwan gives way to Renshu's story in America, and finally Renshu's daughter Lily trying to figure out who she is, we get to know this family's struggle, and how events of the past can shape a person in the future.

This one took me a bit to get into, but once I got into it (about when Meilin flees with Renshu the first time), it really sucked me in. The writing is exceptional, and really painted a picture of Meilin, her family, and what China looked like in her time. It's a multigenerational tale in the same way Pachinko is, but I thought this one was written a bit better and didn't overstay its welcome as much, so I enjoyed it more. I will say I think I was more invested in Meilin's story in the beginning, and Lily's story at the end, than I was with Renshu's story in the middle. Maybe his story would resonate with me more if I were more familiar with Chinese politics in America at the time, as it felt like I was missing context in the story for Renshu's paranoia. I really felt for Lily trying to figure out who she is, sandwiched between America and China and wanting to understand where she came from.

I really enjoyed this one though, despite my mild hangups with Renshu's point of view. Great writing and a sad story.

"We always sit at the plank."

This is like if my favorite author, Guy Gavriel Kay, wrote Game of Thrones without gratuitous sex scenes and almost all political intrigue. Which is to say, yes please, more of this for me.

Navola is run by its bankers. Davico, son of Devonaci, is coming of age as part of the di Regulai family, shrewd, powerful merchants who have pull everywhere. Devonaci is a master businessman, and Davico spends all his days growing up comparing himself to his father and coming up short. But time doesn't care if you're not ready, and Davico finds himself thrust more and more frequently into the types of political intrigue he hates. His adopted sister, Celia, however is steeped in intrigues, and finds herself more than capable of navigating the twisty Navola mind. When things come to a political boil, though, Davico's naiveness may be his and his family's downfall.

Right off the bat I'll say that this isn't a book for just anyone. It's like...literary fantasy? Not a whole lot happens immediately, or at all. Some action-adjacent things happen around the 50% mark, and then again for the last quarter of the book, but by and large this is a character-driven political fantasy seen through a vaguely Italian lens. That appealed to me, but probably won't to an average fantasy reader. Yes there is a dragon (or...a part of a dragon, I guess), but I wouldn't call it a central character. The last quarter of the book is brutal though, and made me experience a large enough mental WTF that I spent a chunk of my cruise holed up in my cabin finishing the book to find out what happens.

My only hangups really was the ending and how the author basically (major ending spoilers here) wrote Celia out of the book. Yes, she does put in an appearance, but I was rather put out at how quickly/easily Davico washed his hands of her betrayal. I feel like something of that magnitude needed longer to marinate. But even that wasn't a large enough of an issue for me to not enjoy things thoroughly.

Recommend this for fans of Guy Gavriel Kay, and political/character-heavy fantasy.

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.

"Time goes by so damn fast."

As a small anecdote to tack on here for myself for later, I was reading my paperback copy of this book on my couch, and it's one of those duologies where you read half/one book and flip it over/around to read the other half/the other book. My husband walked past me perhaps two or three times before he finally asked if I was aware I was reading my book upside down.

These two are some of Murakami's earliest works, and it kind of shows. While the second book (Pinball, 1973) feels more like a cohesive book with some narrative direction, the first book (Hear the Wind Sing) just felt like scenes strung together until the book stopped having pages. Both feature the same two characters as main characters, Rat and our unnamed protagonist, just trying to make sense of the world in their early 20s, when things change, people move on, and they have to figure out what it means to be an adult. It's not quite angst these two are facing, but uncertainty about what to do with their lives beyond what they've always done (drink at J's bar, women, sit at the beach). Stagnation and moving on are common themes in Murakami's works, I've noticed. The second book has the only real magical realism here, and even that only comes in towards the last third of the book or so. It's not quite on par with some of his other books I enjoyed more, but I do like the idea of an advice-giving pinball machine.

I have the other books in this series at home, and I'm interested to see how more developed they are, since they're more full-fledged novels than these two were. Not bad books, but kind of forgettable.

"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.

"It's possible that all these little moments that meant so much to me never meant quite the same thing to him."

This is me, trying very hard to keep an open mind, about a genre I don't normally read. I love that this genre exists for people, because I earnestly believe that there's a book out there for everyone, I just never connected well with romances in general. Maybe I'm too much of a realist.

I'll start with what I liked, because there are good things here for people who enjoy the genre. I loved the early days of Poppy/Alex's friendship, maybe because I can identify with that part. Just two awkward college students exploring a maybe friendship and being along for the ride as it slowly morphs into something more (in their heads). I thought that was done well, realistically, believably. I also did like how the author managed to build up some feelings about how things end up. I wasn't totally in love with the back-and-forth in time format of the story, but it did keep me reading to figure out A) what happened in Croatia (spoiler alert: not as much as I was expecting), and B) how they managed to resolve things.

Poppy started out endearing with how over-the-top she is in basically everything, but as the book went on, it started to become a bit much. I especially thought it was unnecessary after (late book spoilers)Alex and Poppy finally start being honest with each other about their feelings. Rather than confront things head on, Poppy makes jokes, deflects, and flails about to avoid being direct and honestly exploring her feelings. She seems a bit needy in both attention and affection, and that seems like a poor match for Alex.

I also have never seen two people who claim to be such good friends be so entirely unable to communicate with one another. Jokes, lighthearted conversation, anything superficial is fine, but having an honest, direct, deep conversation about the two of them seems entirely beyond them. Had they just said what needed to be said 8 years ago, they wouldn't be pining after each other for so long. Plot built on miscommunication/noncommunication drives me up a particular wall, so I admit this is maybe a personal hangup.

Finally, while I did like how the author portrayed Poppy and Alex, I didn't feel like enough of the story was actually dedicated to them. Instead, we get lots of short chapters with short, choppy sentences about the places they go together, but nothing that really shows their relationship developing at all. We just have to trust it happens at some point, based on the This Summer story happening concurrently with the flashbacks. Show, don't tell.

I promise I love my husband and am not anti-love/romance. But I just couldn't get into 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.

"How strange that the familiar fields and lakes and forests of Earth shone with such celestial glory when one looked at them from afar! Perhaps there was a lesson here; perhaps no man could appreciate his own world until he had seen it from space."

Not a bad book exactly, but you have to be in the mood for what this book is for it to really hit with you.

The Selene is a tourist craft on the Moon, dedicated to ferrying small groups of people around the surface on tours. On one of these tours, an earthquake (moonquake?) causes a sinkhole to open up around Selene and swallow up her and her passengers.

The bulk of the book is taken up by men of science doing their science thing in brainstorming ways to get air to the ship and rescue them. Meanwhile, we're treated to chapters involving the passengers keeping up morale, putting on plays, reading aloud, and generally being goofy (in a 1960s sort of way). It's very much a classic, a product of its time, but not in the racist/sexist way I've used that phrase to mean in other books. More like, a stilted way of writing, a plot with science galore but nothing/almost nothing in the way of character development. Really, the only characterization that exists is in the form of Pat (captain) longing after Sue (stewardess), again, in a 1960s sort of way.

It's fun, it's short, it's a classic for a reason. It's very readable, but you have to really like old sci-fi writing styles to enjoy this one.

"Have a little faith in your wife, dear. I can be resourceful when I need to be."

Last year, I read Ascension by this author and wasn't too in love with it. I thought I'd give him another try though, and I'm really glad I did. While not perfect, this one was a really enjoyable time travel/memory story, with a really sweet lifelong love story sandwiched in. It reminded me a lot of Blake Crouch's Recursion (which I also really liked), but more thoughtful and less Hollywood action-y.

Maggie's husband Stanley is in a home for memory loss patients, and routine is really the only thing keeping her going as she watches her husband and all their memories fade. What she thought was brought on by old age or disease turns out to be something more sinister, as a strange caller named Hassan reveals to her that Stanley's memories are actively being erased and Maggie is the only one who can maybe stop the whole thing. She reluctantly plays along with Hassan and his lab of strange equipment, and begins diving into Stanley's memories as if she's actually living them alongside him. But the more she delves into his memories ostensibly to save them, the stranger things get, and the less and less she trusts Hassan and his motives.

Okay, so up front, Maggie is a badass old lady. You're going to need to suspend some disbelief here, because she's 83, maybe she works out a ton and doesn't skip yoga. But this really was a fun, thoughtful story about memories, and experiencing a life with someone from another angle. We get two points of view here, Maggie in the...current time, I guess, strapped up to the memory device with Hassan guiding her as a voice in her head, told as an interview of sorts, and Stanley in the...past, I guess, told straight up as a normal story. Things get a little confusing as the story progresses and things start being revealed, but that's essentially the format of the story. I sort of thought the interview format of Maggie's chapters was a bit confusing, especially with what happens later on, but once you get going it's not so bad. I was pleasantly surprised to see how much care the author put into Stanley's and Maggie's relationship together, and how pivotal it ends up being to the story as a whole. I really was invested in seeing these two through their ordeal, and the ending made me feel things.

One of the reasons for the four stars rather than the five stars is the ending. IT'S NOT A BAD ENDING, please don't get me wrong, but (major ending spoilers here) are we to assume then that Stanley is just fucked? Because while Maggie gets to live her never-ending loop of great memories over and over and over again with Hassan/Jacques probably, inevitably, going crazy right there with her, Stanley is wheelchair-bound, locked in his mind, never to be fixed. I assume, anyway, since that's how the book ends. I feel like more needed to be done/said regarding Stanley for that ending to sit right with me. But in broad strokes, I really loved the sentiment that a life between two people lived well is enough for one lady to be willing to keep a memory-eating force and megalomaniac at bay by reliving it over and over and over again, potentially with a crazy man in tow.

Just a book that made me sit back and go, "huh", for many reasons. This one will probably stick with me for a bit.

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.