Matt

I wanted to like this book so badly. This is the 10th Leigh Bardugo book I’ve read. Before reading this she was batting a perfect 1.000 for me. Of the nine books I had read by her previously I would say that I enjoyed every single one. What’s even crazier is that I felt like she had been getting better. Her two most recent books (Ninth House and Hell Bent) were my two favorites. To top it off, it’s a historical fantasy book set in the time of the Spanish Inquisition, which is a really interesting time period and one rife to do fun things with from a fantasy writer’s perspective. To say that I went into The Familiar with high expectations would be an understatement. I didn’t just think that I would like it. I felt like I already knew that I would like it.

And yet I didn’t. I waited for the moment for the book to click for me and it never did. I don’t think The Familiar is totally irredeemable. Bardugo clearly did a ton of research into the setting, there are some really cool set pieces and some of the supporting characters are really cool. There are really only a couple of criticisms that I can make about the book. Unfortunately they are pretty big mistakes.

The first is that I just don’t find the main characters to be interesting at all. Here I’m mostly talking about Luzia and Santangel, who are easily the most prominent characters in the book. I just can’t bring myself to care about them, which is a really big problem because the book really needs you to be emotionally invested in them and their love story. Luzia is just boring and when she’s not boring she’s antagonistic to the point that it makes it hard to root for her. Santangel is a cardboard cutout of ‘edgy male love interest’ to the point that I could believe he was a character in a Twilight knockoff. When you have a romance between these two characters and have that be one of the biggest storylines of your book, the book isn’t going to be good. A novel can survive having boring or unlikable side characters. But even the best worldbuilding, supporting characters and pacing cannot save a book in which the two main characters just aren’t compelling. What’s so strange about this criticism is that I know for a fact that Bardugo can write characters like this extremely well. Alex from Ninth House and Hell Bent shares plenty of similarities with Luzia on paper but she’s actually great and is a huge part of what makes those books so good. Nikolai from the Grishaverse has some stuff in common with Santangel but he was easily compelling enough to carry a duology by himself. If a writer who I didn’t have as much faith in wrote these characters I’d be more forgiving but once again I know that Bardugo can do better than this and that’s what makes this criticism so frustrating.

While most of what I dislike about the book comes down to the fact that I just don’t care about Luzia and Santangel, it also has to be mentioned that this book has some weird pacing issues. I feel like it’s way too long and yet somehow feels rushed at various points as well. There is a lot of stuff going on throughout this book and I feel like a few sections or subplots could easily be taken out and make the book better.

For an NBA player, shooting 90% from the free throw line is exceptional. 90% gets you at least an A- in most classes. For a writer, having 90% of your bibliography be amazing is very worthy of praise. I still like Bardugo and consider her to be one of my favorite authors today. But this book is a notable miss for her.

 This is a very short (a little over 100 pages) novella that functions as a capstone to N.K. Jemisin's ‘Inheritance' trilogy.  Jemisin is someone who specializes in grand themes and huge plots and I wasn't sure how that style would translate to a novella but I was pleasantly surprised here.  Jemisin's creativity once again shines here as she weaves a tale about Shill, a godling meant to replace Sieh from the trilogy proper.  As it turns out, Shill is not Sieh, and a decent amount of the book is spent with her internal conflict regarding that.  Ultimately, this is a story about choices and expectations and I think Jemisin does a really solid job exploring those themes in such a short space.  It's a really fun, quick read that I would recommend to anyone who liked the three books in the main ‘Inheritance' trilogy. 

 This is my first Agatha Christie novel and to say I had fun with it is an understatement.  It's really hard to talk about this book without spoilers but I will say that The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a very well-constructed murder mystery that left me guessing up until the last moment.  Part of why it's fun is that the characters are all really interesting and suspicious in their own way.  You can see why anyone could be Roger Ackroyd's murderer and each piece of detail and dialogue leaves you thinking.  I am a lifelong consumer of fictional murder mystery media and part of the fun of consuming this type of content is figuring out why the creator would include certain details.  Christie is a master at this.  She leaves so many little nuggets of information sprinkled throughout the book that the reader has to decide which are relevant and which aren't.  As a result, I felt like I was playing along with the characters in the book.  While they were trying to figure out who the murderer was, I was trying to figure out what Christie was doing.  And yet I will admit that I was totally fooled.  The best mysteries are the ones in which you as a consumer feel like you got outsmarted by the creator in an honest way and Christie certainly got the better of me.  Every clue was laid out for me to piece the puzzle together but I didn't.  Well done Agatha, this is a classic for a reason.
 

I first became aware of this book thanks to the extremely funny coincidence of two books named The Seven _ of Evelyn H_ coming out within the span of about a year . This book has nothing in common with Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo but the two will always be linked in my mind and in fact I don’t think I would have read either of them if the other didn’t exist (fun fact, in the UK this book is just called The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, the name was changed in America to avoid confusion with Evelyn Hugo. I wasn’t the biggest fan of Reid’s book about the writing of the memoirs of a Hollywood starlet although it did have its strong points. Fortunately for me I liked this one a lot more.

The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle has an incredibly intriguing premise, which is good for any novel but is especially nice for a whodunnit. A man is given one task: find out who is going to kill Evelyn Hardcastle. To do so, he relives the same day eight times, each as a different person who is there on the night of her death. It’s an awesome idea, however it requires a very strong storyteller not only to write it, but to keep the plot stable at all. There are so many ways that a book like this could fail. It can get too convoluted. It can have plot holes. It can get too caught up in all its details. The fact that Turton tackled this concept with his first book is very impressive and I will say he succeeds as a storyteller throughout Evelyn Hardcastle’s 458 pages.

The most important thing that Turton succeeds at throughout Evelyn Hardcastle is making it a blast to read. Whodunnits are at their best when the author drops clues here and there about the central mystery, leading the reading experience to become a game of author vs. reader. I will say that I did not come close to unraveling most of the mysteries laid out in the book but I totally believe that a more astute reader who has more experience with whodunnits could have figured out most of this book’s puzzles.

This book does go off the rails a bit towards the end, when Turton tries to use it to explore deeper concepts that don’t fit all that well here. I get the ideas that he is trying to raise, but this is not the book to talk about them. This book is sci-fi adjacent and sci-fi loves to use its premises to tackle questions about humanity but I think it’s at its worst when it leans too heavy into that angle.

All in all this is an amazing time and I would highly recommend it to any mystery fan.

The Master of Disguise is a book that feels better than it actually is. While reading it I generally enjoyed it but the more I thought about it the less I liked it. The main reason for this disconnect is that upon reflection I’m not totally sure what it’s supposed to be simply because it’s not great at anything I can think of. Is it an inside look at intelligence operations during the Cold War? Kind of, except so much of what was used was still classified at the time of its writing, meaning so many details have to be left out. Is it a guy telling stories about his time in the CIA? You could say that, except it’s written in an extremely professional, dry manner that makes it hard to appreciate. Is it a memoir of a genuinely interesting guy who lived a fascinating life? Sort of, we only get bits and pieces about who Mendez is outside of the CIA and even then heavy periods of his CIA life are glossed over. As such it’s hard to really praise it when I can’t put my finger on what exactly I’d be praising it for.

There’s also the fact that this is a weird book to talk about simply because of what it is and when it was written: an insider account on American espionage during the Cold War published in 1999. As such, it’s a book that feels like a victory lap as America had defeated its greatest enemy two years before the nation’s collective conscience was completely shaken. Does that make this book an effective time capsule? Once again I can’t really say it’s that either because the book doesn’t evoke the feelings of the late 90s.

All that said, this book is a fun ride at points. It’s at its best when giving these little microdetails about certain declassified techniques. If the book was all that then it would be great. As such it’s really not that and for that reason I can’t really recommend it, even to someone who is interested in this topic.