altlovesbooks

What a weirdly unremarkable book. I listened to the audiobook and experienced the weird feeling of totally forgetting each chapter I finished as I finished them.

This is a historical fiction mystery where the detective is actually a lady doctor in a period where ladies just aren't doctors. She's a teacher at a school for other ladies who wish to become doctors, and we get many scenes about her teaching/doctoring, and the ridicule/disparagement she faces doing so. A friend of hers goes missing and she takes it upon herself to determine why, so while she's teaching/doctoring, she's also being a detective. She gets up to a lot in the 1800s.

I thought the ending was fine, I thought the writing was fine, I thought our main character was a bit too much "good at everything" to be believable, but I know a lot of people don't mind that. Just nothing about this book stuck with me though, and I can't put my finger on why. It did feel a bit slow in the beginning, where most of the book is spent introducing us to our main character and spending a lot of time in her classes teaching students.

I guess if the premise sounds interesting give it a try? Lots of people seem to enjoy this book, but I thought it was bland and kind of forgettable.

DNF @ 10% - Just isn't holding my attention like I thought it would. Maybe I'm just not in the right mindset right now? Maybe it's because I'm listening to the audiobook? I'll put it down for now and maybe pick it up again in the future.

"As far as interplanetary warfare was concerned, this was up close and personal."

Holy hell this took me forever to get through. I'm not sure why, the series is actually pretty great, but somewhere after the first third I just stopped reading it for the longest time.

In any case, this book was the galactic conclusion to the trilogy, where everyone we've met along the way comes together to have a final showdown against the curators. Like the other two books, this one's split amongst the different POV characters we've been following the entire time, and we follow their perspectives as we ride the buildup and climax of the entire trilogy. There's some subverted deaths, some actual deaths, and plenty of character development and romance(!) along the way.

I actually felt like this final book had too much character development, as it sort of took away from any sort of final battle I was expecting. While I love the care and dedication to these characters, their personal stories basically took the spotlight and the actual curator fight/confrontation was just a footnote at the end of the whole thing. Kind of disappointing after the buildup to this point.

Still, this was a really entertaining series, with obvious parallels to Mass Effect (the waystations, the curators), Star Wars (the Idran Var and a number of other things), and a few other sci-fi tropes along the way. Highly recommend if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Cute, but ultimately forgettable. Kind of a tale about how a small lie can quickly balloon into something unmanageable, but I don't think the execution was all that great. A lot of common sense reactions from the humans in the story (shock, horror, fear) were absent in favor of the underlying message of acceptance and making the lie right in the end.

The artwork was also kind of weirdly unsettling to me. Like a comic strip, but even more basic? I don't know, I just didn't connect much with the art or the layout.

Fine for a cute story, not much else.

"The dose makes the poison."

As I write this, my husband is giving me the side eye after listening to me go on about how awesome this book about poisons and the people who used them was. I can't imagine why, because we both know I lack the attention span required to cook up a poison or two.

But in all seriousness, this was a fantastic book about several different natural and synthetic compounds that were used to commit crimes. Each chapter features a different poison, centers around a major case (and sometimes a minor one as well) where the poison featured prominently, and discusses medically what happens when the poison is administered and other neat (read: morbid) facts about efficacy, cures, and how the poison was made or discovered. My favorite chapter was the chapter on ricin, if only for the morbidly amusing story about an elderly woman in Vermont who cooked up poisons in her assisted living kitchen. The chapter on polonium was also fascinating.

It's not a very long book and the poisons discussed were all ones I had at least heard of, if not knew the details about. It's not a comprehensive book about all poisons ever, but what it does talk about is well fleshed out and entertaining to read about. Just a great, interesting read all around.

Maybe pick your audience carefully before discussing this book, though.

This was more of a memoir/tongue-in-cheek nonfiction about the reasons the author reads, with some bonus advice about how we can use her experiences to improve our own reading. It's basically a series of essays about various topics related to reading--everything from the author's early experiences in a library to how to read horror if you're a scared reader to teaching a classroom of students how to appreciate Lincoln in the Bardo to a lot more diverse topics.

Not a lot connects one essay to the next except the author's life and reading, but it was an interesting listen none-the-less. It was a great audiobook for me to listen to, as I feel like if I were reading it I would start getting bored of the meandering-ness of the book. I did get some things out of it, and really liked her approach to working in poetry that I might consider doing, but not a lot will stick with me now that it's done.

I do think the author has a great sense of humor and outlook on life though. It was an amusing book to listen to, if nothing else.

"Fearlessness, as Logen Ninefingers had once observed, is a fool's boast."

Look, okay guys? Okay? I finished this series! And now I can (honestly) say that I've already read it when someone says I should read it. So you can stop recommending it to me!

My full thoughts about the full series was that book 2 was the best, both story-wise and pacing-wise. This book is better than book 1 to me in basically every way, but it lacks a certain something that makes it better placed than book 2 in my mind.

This book specifically had some really awesome chapters. I loved that this book shrugged off its one-character-per-chapter POV structure for certain huge events, giving us multiple perspectives of a single event within a single chapter. This allowed you to check in briefly with all your favorites to make sure everything is (more or less) okay with them and see how they fit into the larger event being told. It's a nice touch, and employed wonderfully in this book.

I have some minor hangups about a few of the minor characters in this book/series, but maybe they're addressed in the followup books or a short story. I haven't really checked. One specific example of this is (character/plot spoilers here) Queen Terez. Her attitude is a neat twist on the married to the king trope, but it didn't seem worked in very well. We get a few chapters involving it, and a conclusion (more or less) involving Glokta, and that's basically it. It didn't seem all that important to include, and while it doesn't really take away from the story, it doesn't really add anything either. Again, maybe this is addressed in later books/stories, I obviously haven't gotten that far. There's one or two other minor characters that would fit this as well.

But overall, a really enjoyable read once the series really got rolling. Glokta remains my favorite.

"We are those who resist."

I'm still really enjoying this series, but I felt like things dragged near the middle of this book a bit. My attention wandered in a few chapters, and one of the points of view I really liked from the first book seemed utterly different in this one.

Book two picks up where book one left off, with the waystations starting to pop off with mysterious signals, and each of the main players from the first book off on their own little adventures. We follow these different characters on their stories, with Kojan trying to come to terms with his impending death-by-implant-malfunction, Rivus butting heads with Tarvan over whether they should secure a friendship with the enemy-of-my-mysterious-enemy and create a united front, Niole trying to figure out if she's Idran-Var or a legionnaire, and Ridley waxing hot and cold over Halressan (mostly hot) and supposedly doing stuff plot-related, but not a lot actually happens with her.

If you couldn't tell from that, Ridley's POV was my least favorite in this book. (character/plot spoilers here) She's nowhere near the scrappy human-dumped-into-an-alien-underworld she was in the first book. Now she's attached at the hip to Halressan, who spends most of this book ignoring her. I also don't really know what she contributed to the overall plot beyond jetting out to some remote corner of the galaxy and waking up an old siolean goddess-but-not-really. In the first book she moved a lot of plot, had a lot of spunk, and was pretty badass. Now she's kinda moony and can't seem to decide what she wants to do for herself anymore. I don't know, not my thing. But beyond that, the rest of the book was pretty great. Without having to take time to do as much worldbuilding and story setup, this book was very much wall-to-wall action. Lots of flashy things happen to keep you interested, and I particularly liked Rivus's POV in this one. The angst he feels over his best friend is fantastic.

Just an overall really interesting, fun sci-fi book. Absolutely picking up book 3.

I actually thought this was really good! I'm not the hugest DC fan outside of Batman, but I appreciated the different take on the Superman origin story where the Els have set up a whole kingdom, Bruce is a bastard son, and there's a rival kingdom wanting to bring the whole thing down. There's some really great art here as well, hats off to the artist.

I think my favorite part about this entire thing is Harley's role as an advisor of sorts to Bruce. She's still unmistakably Harley, but there's an undercurrent of actual wisdom and concern to her advice that I appreciated as being different and special.

Just a fun Elseworlds medieval tale, highly recommend.

"The new beginning they had been looking for was the middle of someone else's story."

Man, this was a fun sci-fi story. It felt like someone put Mass Effect and Star Wars in a blender and made a delightful space opera smoothie out of it. Great story, great characters, a ton of world (universe?) building, it just felt a bit overwhelming at times.

So the idea here is that humanity back home is fighting a losing battle with itself. The planet is overcrowded, the resources are depleted, and it's either find a new home out amongst the stars or die a smothered, miserable death. Luckily for everyone involved, we have Alvera and her hand picked crew on hand to scout the stars and find a new place for us to live (and, y'know, start the cycle all over again, but nevermind that). Unfortunately, their first jaunt out into space runs them headlong into some uncomfortable truths about the universe, and also puts them right in the middle of a galactic conflict, a (maybe) impending universal threat, and a coup that breaks up her merry band. Life isn't easy out in the universe, evidently.

So, there's a lot going on in this book, which is what prevented me from really giving this the 5 stars I was considering. The author is really talented at crafting interesting, unique characters, worlds, and motivations, but the problem is she has too many good ideas at once so you're never really sure where to look. After the initial push into the universe, the crew breaks up into different stories all tangentially related to the main plot, but also containing their own side quests that sort of make the book feel like a short story compilation. Which isn't a bad thing! I quite enjoyed these different stories, and there's definitely enough main plot movement sprinkled throughout to not feel too bogged down. It just sometimes felt like a bit much.

But the characters were really well done and distinct, and I enjoyed them all basically equally. I think the Rivus/Tarvan friend/conflict story is my favorite thus far, but they're all pretty great. With a cast as large as what you find here, it's a delightful surprise to not have similar characters blending together or a POV or two that I didn't like. The writing is also pretty great, engaging, and I can honestly say that I'm not quite sure where the main story is headed yet.

I'm trying to make it this year's goal to actually finish series I start, so I've already started book two. Can't wait to see where this one goes.

"You'd have to be a bold man to bet your life on what I'd dare. How bold are you?"

Now we're talking.

Despite having some issues with the first book being slow, the cast feeling a bit huge, and having no real idea where things were headed until the last third of the book, I still came away from it mostly enjoying the experience. I went into book two with some cautious optimism as a result, and I have to say this exceeded my expectations nicely.

Things pick up where the first book left off, with all the same character POVs, plot lines, and motivations intact. Because the first book spent so much time setting up the world, this is all flash and no filler. We have city sieges, an epic world-spanning journey, personal journeys of self discovery and realization, a budding romance(?), and more character defining moments than you can shake a Shanka at. I love that the author manages to make this book simultaneously dark and humorous, without it becoming too forced. Everything has a point and a purpose, and it took until book two for me to see that.

Just an excellent second book overall. I've already started on the third.

Well I thought this was absolutely delightful.

It’s a fairly straightforward retelling of the Inch High Samurai folktale from Japan, but where this one shines best is in its artwork and in its dialogue. The art is rather one-note (kind of like an old samurai film), but also beautiful at the same time. There’s some full page spreads that are incredibly striking and emotional at the same time. The dialogue too was something special, rather like if this traditional folktale were being told by the creators of Avatar: The Last Airbender where he banters with his friends in one scene, bookended with serious dialogue about his purpose in life with his father and his teacher that really stirs the emotions in another.

I think this was a really well done telling of this particular tale. Give it a go if you’re interested in Japanese folklore, because you won’t be disappointed.

Hmm.... I think I wanted to like this book more than I did, so I think this warranted 3.5 stars more than 4 stars. I loved the kinda-retro-kinda-not art style, and the cover was especially striking. There's lots of playing with panel layouts, particularly later in the book, which I like to see.

Where it kind of fell a little flat for me was in the story. It's a fairly straightforward haves-exploiting-the-have-nots tale, with the narrative twist being that they're literal children being exploited to maintain the way of life for the adults who built the ship. They're forever dangling the 'when we get to Eden, everything will be paradise' carrot in front of the workers who maintain the ship, glossing over the fact that the graduates are never seen again and that they never seem to get to Eden. I thought the pacing of the story was a bit weak, things take a while to get going, and then towards the end some of the important plot points get glossed over or downplayed. One example of this specifically (story spoilers here) is when Effie and friends break their way into where the graduates are, and we're treated to the horror that they're being impregnated to bear the children to continue the cycle, and all we really get is a window scene looking in on them and some vague threatening dialogue and that's it. I feel like that moment could've been expounded on a bit more to make it hit home a bit harder. There are other smaller examples of reveals and such that I feel like would've had a bit more emotional impact if they were expanded out a bit more.

It's still a decent read, just one I expected to get more out of in the end.

"That’s what the book’s about, right? The pleasure of finding your people?"

This book is about Artie, a man in New York trying to make it as a writer writing his first book, hanging out with his friends at a local bar, dealing with complex relationship issues, and just generally living life as a gay 20-something in a big city. This book is also about Artie, an approaching-elderly man 30 years later, trying to make the best of things without his close friends and lovers, attempting to make himself useful by volunteering at GALS, the local LGBTQ senior center and falling (literally) into a new group of friends he has to navigate now. We bounce between these two time periods as Artie’s story is fleshed out, following him through high and low points, and just generally getting to know this man’s life story.

I’m not even in the demographic this book is about, and I thought this book was delightful. There’s something about following a person through their life that really gets to me sometimes, and I thought the author did an incredibly good job of making me feel invested in Artie, both in the past 90s period and the current 2022 period. There’s occasional dark moments in Artie’s life, but the author does a good job of making even these low points seem worthwhile and meaningful in his life. The 90s period especially brings up a lot of tough topics surrounding the AIDS crisis and the impact it has on their community, but I thought it was very respectfully done.

Just a book about a guy and his found family, delightful and heartwarming.

I won a free copy of this ARC from Goodreads Giveaways.

This book is probably a master class in how to write a character who’s neurodivergent (named Sunday) and the struggles she goes through in trying to understand her daughter. A new couple moves in next door to them, and the over-the-top personality of the wife, Vita, entrances Sunday. The two seem to hit it off, but after one rewarding summer for Sunday, she slowly comes to realize that the couple next door isn’t what they appear and her entire carefully constructed life slowly starts unraveling.

I really was incredibly interested in seeing how Sunday navigates her world. Certain colors of foods and things bother her, so that her meals generally all have to be of a certain color for her to eat them. She views life and human courtesies through the lens of an old etiquette book for ladies, and dispenses pearls of wisdom out of a book about Sicilian folklore. She approaches conversations tonally, and habitually taps out speech patterns and imitates the speaker’s lilt in her head. I liked seeing how she tried to adapt to Vita’s unconventional ways, making an effort to get to know her despite being so foreign in mannerisms. It was enlightening getting inside Sunday’s head and seeing how she sees the world.

Unfortunately this only took up half the book. The other half, after the summer Sunday spent with Vita and her husband Rollo, when the wheels start falling off Sunday’s ordered life, wasn’t nearly as interesting to me. Things felt a little repetitive as the same thoughts, ideas, and plot points are reiterated and retread. The buildup to an ending I suspected was coming felt slow, and the payoff at the end felt a little weak. A lot of Sunday’s quirks felt like they were put by the wayside in favor of the plot involving her daughter, not that they stopped existing, but they stopped mattering in the story as much. I don’t know, the second half just didn’t click with me as much as the first half.

But there’s lots here for people to like! I highly recommend giving it a try if the premise still appeals to you, because it may hit you differently than it hit me.

I picked this one up because it reminded me of the premise to another series I read ages ago (The Acts of Caine by Matthew Woodring Stover, highly highly suggest it), and I wanted to see another take on the idea. Essentially, there’s a world within a world—a destination where anyone (with money) can live out the story of their dreams in a fantasy world crewed by employees of a mega corp. Stella takes a PI job offered by Jericho, CEO of this company, in order to pay her family’s bills, and gets sent on a trip through all four quarters of this fantasy world chasing down a fugitive who is there for his own reasons. She gets caught up in the investigation, discovers there’s way more going on here than she anticipated, and gets stuck having to play both sides of the story in order to bring the real criminals to justice.

The story setting is unique and is mostly successful at what it sets out to do. Each quarter of this fantasy world has a different setting, to provide varied stories and backdrops for paying customers. I felt like the first two were depicted the best, but towards the end the story started feeling a little rushed and immersive detail started to be left behind. I do feel like it didn't seem very sci-fi despite the year being far into the future, which was a bit of a disappointment.

The cast of characters is unique and fairly well fleshed out, though again in the later parts of the book some of the late-introduced characters felt a little flat. Stella also felt a bit inconsistent in how she approached/reacted to situations. She’s clearly meant to be a badass female lead, but several scenes had her seem pretty helpless and reliant on the men around her.

I was aso a bit skeeved out by the choice of love interest(s?) for the main character. Relationship/story spoilers here: Corso’s constant Honey-ing (with a capital H in my ebook) grated on my nerves, and there was vague harem-esque tones here with how Henry was set up in the beginning, and Jericho’s introduction as well. Idk, maybe I’m reading too much into it.

It was fine, but I’m not sure I’ll read book two. Seriously though, if the idea of a world created just for entertainment value appeals to you, give The Acts of Caine by Matthew Woodring Stover a go. Much (much much) darker, but very satisfying.

"Constantly and futilely, the earth’s atmosphere seeks to achieve equilibrium. Weather is the turbulent means to this perfect, hopeless end."

This book is an account of the big blizzard that struck the plains states in 1888, called the Children’s Blizzard because of the unfortunately high proportion of children who died during it. The day of the blizzard was unseasonably warm, kids left home to walk to school without appropriate weather gear, and then the inevitable tragedy struck. It’s an incredibly sad tale, one recounted in fairly gruesome detail here, both during the blizzard and the frostbite-y aftermath of some of the victims.

I just wish it clicked with me more. The beginning of the book was fairly slow. We get a lot of backstory behind some of the families, immigrants called from overseas with the promise of better lives for the most part. They arrived in the plains without being prepared for the incredibly wild weather swings and the feast or famine nature of farming there. But there’s just so much backstory for the families that I found myself checking out a bit. Then we get a detailed chapter about weather forecasting of the period and all the major players there, which again had me checked out a bit while the author talked about how (understandably) hard forecasting was back then. I just found it a bit dull.

Then during the actual blizzard, it felt like the author played it a bit fast and loose with some of the victims. Chapter 8 especially felt a lot like disaster fanfiction, where we’re treated to entire sections of what victims of the blizzard went through during their final minutes but without anyone being there, there’s no way to know any of it was accurate. It’s not like they made it home to write journal entries, and the dead by and large died alone or together so nobody was there to carry the tale home. It felt a little gratuitous and contrived.

But the blizzard itself is an incredibly sad story that I’m glad to have (finally) read about when I got to those segments of the book. Those parts that were factual, pulled from accounts, were very compelling and should have made up the bulk of the book.

I’m going to keep this brief because nothing I can say can really do this book justice. It’s very short (~150 pages), but I kept having to put it down because the writing was so powerful, the stories so sad, and the subject matter so heavy. The book follows a small group of unconnected people (a housewife and her kids, a religious man, a couple doctors, a female plant worker) who had the terrible luck of being within the blast of Hiroshima’s atomic bomb. What they were doing up to the bomb’s detonation, what life was like immediately afterward, and the more long term effects they all suffered from.

It's heartbreaking and pulls no punches. There’s very vivid descriptions of burns, lesions, amputations, infections, and other expected medical effects, which serve to highlight how terrible the whole situation was.

This gets all my stars for the year.

Ick.

Okay, so this ended up being way more general fiction than it was either horror (unless you count body horror) or thriller. I think I was expecting something way different than what I was delivered, and while the story told isn’t bad exactly, I get kind of bored with stories involving people working through childhood trauma. Even if that story is told inside the (literal) belly of a whale.

Jay has daddy issues. His father was a lover of the sea, a diver who also took on unpleasant jobs to pay the bills for his large family. Has a big attitude problem, and looks down on anyone who doesn’t view the sea and everything in her the same way he does, including his own son. He expected Jay to follow in his footsteps and become a diver, an activist, a lover of the sea in his own right, and the two grew apart when Jay didn’t want any of that for himself. (Ending spoilers here) Then his father dies, a suicide off his friend’s boat, and Jay feels compelled to retrieve his father’s underwater remains in an attempt to heal the rift in the family that the two of them left behind. He becomes a whale snack, and the rest of the book is him trying to get out of this whale, while also hearing the voice of his dead father and working through all the issues the two of them had with each other.

This one’s more literary than I was expecting, and the pacing is incredibly slow for what it is. While in the belly of the whale, we’re treated to flashbacks in Jay’s life that further defines the relationship between him and his father, interspersed with very short segments about his attempts to get out of the whale. See, the whale just seems like a metaphor for the grief and guilt Jay carries around with him surrounding his father and Jay leaving home, and while I’m sure there’s something there for people that appeals to, I was here for whale science and “holy shit I’m swallowed by a whale, what do??”

There’s also a ton of visceral body horror, both in Jay and in the whale, leaving me queasy a number of times as I envisioned “Beaky” in his hand, being slowly dissolved by stomach acid, and various other injuries sustained while on his weird physical-and-mental journey.

So, like, it’s a fine book, but just not for me. I made it through out of stubbornness, but it didn’t feel like a rewarding slog through whale stomach contents.

DNF at 12%.

My husband is a prior marine, and hearing a marine talking marine things in what was supposed to be a horror/thriller book just didn't do it for me. I know the acronyms, I know the terminology, I know the concepts.... but I'm here for thrills and scares and I didn't get a feeling like it was going to be that thrilling/scary.

Unless you count hearing FOB over and over again terrifying.

Nope.

Every time I try and read something from the thriller/mystery pile of books people recommend to me, I come away disappointed. Maybe it's me?

The rest of this will be in spoilers. Know that there's heavy ending spoilers here.

Okay, so I have a major problem with authors who try so hard to be smarter than their readers, and this book had that in spades. When The Twist happens in the last 2o% of the book or so, I think us, as the readers, are supposed to just ignore the first part of the book and pretend like it never happened, because after The Twist it just doesn't matter anymore. The author's doing the "GOTCHA!" finger guns in the background, and we're supposed to ignore the fact that the entire book was written in first person and thus in the mind of the actual killer, and none of this is even hinted at. All for the sake of The Twist and The Gotcha. Her mind, her thoughts, all of it indicates this is her first time in the house, and yet if she's the killer, it very clearly isn't. It feels like lazy storytelling.

None of the characters are likeable. Except maybe the real estate agent Judy, who knew better than to go driving out to a house in bumfuck nowhere in a blizzard and who has high standards for the houses she shows. You go girl, and good on you for staying out of the book.

I gave it a star for being a quick read, and it at least kept me reading until the end, if only for maybe the wrong reasons.

Shanghailanders is an ambitious debut story about a super rich Shanghai family told in reverse order from 2040 back to 2014. The book opens as the family has basically ended – the children have grown up, grown apart, the husband and wife argue fairly frequently and are apart more often than together. Then, each chapter takes the story back a few years to see how the family got to that point. Each chapter dials the time period back a few years, and follows a different member of the family initially (the three girls, the husband, the wife), and then starts also including various members of the household as well (a driver, a nanny, etc.) to paint a more full story of this family’s life.

The prose of the book was what ultimately kept me reading. The author has a way with words that really painted the scenes, the cities, the different ways the family has of interacting with one another. Ultimately, though, I left disappointed in the book, because it felt like the reverse way of telling the story didn’t add anything. There wasn’t any real payoff at the end for reading the story backwards, and at more than one point in the book I found myself wanting to know what happens as a result of the chapter, not what came before.

There’s a good story here, I just wish it were told differently.

I received an ARC copy free through Goodreads Giveaways.

I thought this book was inoffensively bland at its best and actively harmful at its worst. Early on in the book it talks about determining if the difficult conversation is one that you need to be having at all, and gives the example of two coworkers who aren't getting along. A direct quote from the book about this scenario:

"If you still feel like you need to say something, either because you are the defacto leader, or that the tension between these two coworkers is generally making for an uncomfortable work environment; then the only conversation that you might have is to empower the one who has come to you to have the conversation themselves. You might suggest, 'It sounds to me that there are some important things you need to discuss with your coworker. I know it will be a difficult conversation, but it is probably best that you talk to them rather than me since you are most directly involved.'"

Yes, I'd love for people to be adults about everything, but as a supervisor/manager, there are absolutely times you need to clear up interpersonal issues. Washing your hands of the situation and dumping it back on them to figure out is not a good look.

The rest of the book talks about how to actually have difficult conversations, but most of it is information that I thought was rather obvious. Know your facts, don't make assumptions, don't coe out swinging with wild accusations. I don't like their idea of using a 3x5 card with your talking points, though, since it then looks like you're talking to your card and not to the person, but whatever.

Skip this, was not impressed.

Actually..... not a bad book at all. It's very high level, so if you're looking for minutiae in how to protect your hyper specific use case of a library, you won't find that here, but if you're just looking for something to get you in the right ballpark with your mindset, this did its job well. My library is not a traditional public library so I wasn't able to map some of the advice perfectly to my experiences, but it did get me thinking a lot about the role my library plays in a disaster and the position we're in to assist afterwards.

I thought Chapter 2 was the most useful for me in terms of information and mindset, but I also appreciated the author touching on the aftercare of employees following a disaster in Chapter 3. There's a lot of really great information and links to further assistance all throughout this book, and it was helpful in giving me a jumping off point for planning our own disaster recovery plan.

Orsola Rosso is born into a family of glassmakers, grows up around glassmakers, and all she knows is glass. The book begins with glassmaking rivalry; the Rossos are competing against another family in the glass trade, but it's this other family that finally gives Orsola the chance she needs to start working glass for her family herself. As time passes, we see Murano and Venice change around them, but Orsola's family remains the same, with Orsola's glasswork holding things together. 500 years pass, and we get to see how changing times impacts the Rossos, and Orsola too.

You have to go into this book with an open mind and an ability to ignore glaring inconsistencies with the time skipping idea the book is predicated on. Some of the periods the book touches on are fleshed out in a meaningful way, while others that seemed equally important get only a brief mention, a brief chapter, or are otherwise glossed over before moving on to the next point in time. This time skipping idea was hard for me to get around at first; wouldn't Orsola question the passage of time? But eventually I stopped looking for answers and just enjoyed the book. It's a beautifully crafted story.

I guess my real hangup with this book was the ending. (ending spoilers here) I don't get why Orsola didn't realize that Antonio was dead, had died a long time ago, and that the dolphins she received were crafted by different people. She even points out that each one was crafted differently; to someone as familiar with glass as she was, you'd think that would tell her something.

I enjoyed this book in spite of the time elephant in the room though.