All about the books we love

The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars




I’ve had this on my TBR for far too long after a friend gifted it to me. I’m sorry I waited. I really enjoyed this book. I had a lot of fun with Irene (Adler one wonders given Irene’s fascination with detectives) and Kai. Irene’s head librarian (more or less) has assigned her a duty. Go to this alternative world and retrieve a book and oh, by the way you’re getting a mentee. Enter the devastatingly handsome Kai (whose secret I worked out) Because this library can access the multiverse and collects rare books, often dangerous books and brings them in. Also in the mix is Bradamante (official librarians give up their names once they are full time and take on a favored literary name) who is Irene’s former mentor and now rival and a bit of a bitch.

What should have been an easy job turns out to be less than easy in this steampunkish Victorianesque London where vampires, werewolves and elves are part of the equation. The book in question has been stolen. Why? Who? Are questions that need to be solved and Irene and Kai team up with Vale, this world’s answer to Sherlock Holmes. Worse, the library’s rogue librarian and bogeyman might be loose in this world as well.

There were a lot of fun twists and turns as a steampunker, I appreciated those elements. Irene and Kai don’t always make the right decision but they are never dumb ones really. I like them very much. It was fun. I want to read more but now there are eight books which is daunting. However, I will at least give book two a try because I want more of Irene, Kai and this world.







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Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Honestly it's a 2 star read for me but I gave it one more for the side characters and the Chinese lore but in full disclosure if it wasn't for this being my book club read I would have DNFed it in a heart beat. It starts out great, sets the Covid era scene well and establishes the dynamic of Cora and her half sister Delilah who dies horrifically. Even Cora's job as a crime scene cleaner is unusual and intriguing. I think part of my issue with this is the hype which a) set up the spookiness b) made it sound like a murder mystery/horror. I suppose it kind of is but the book forgets that for half of it.

Cora is the most uninteresting character I've read in a long time. She refers to herself as an echo of her sister and she really is. If I had a drink for every time she talks about having no dreams, no ambition, how she's never listened to or wanted anything, how she's a nothing, I'd die of alcohol poisoning. There's inferiority complexes (and her upbringing would give you one) and then there is this. Cora has zero agency of her own nor does she want any which was a huge issue for me. If not for her friends/co-workers Harvey and Yifei, the hungry ghost would have killed her in the first act and I would have been rooting it on. This bland protagonist zombie shuffles through life and I was reminded of a piece of writing advice I saw recently 'one bit of trauma or quirk' does not a personality make. Cora's whole personality is her germaphobia and how she does what every anyone tells her to do because thinking for herself seems to be too hard.

I nearly DNFed until the incident in the Catholic church (Cora is stuck between her white Catholic Aunt Lois and her Chinese Aunt Zeng who dispenses all the Chinese culture bits about Hungry Ghosts along with Yifei. At least that was interesting and it got a bit better. However, this starts out with the bats appearing at all the crime scenes so Yifei, Cora and Harvey think it's a serial killer and Yifei (not Cora) tries to get law enforcement involved.

And then that is forgotten until the last couple of chapters. The Hungry Ghost of Cora's sister is intriguing and how Yifei, Harvey and Auntie Zeng try to go about stopping it as Cora drifts along in their wake. And then the book takes a hard left, remembers the bats and the deaths and we get a weird ending, where Cora finally does something on her own (not a good something either) and the whole mystery solution is rather lame. The other thing that bothered me other than I was supposed to be rooting for a character with no agency is how in NYC, every person they see (outside of our Asian trio and Auntie Zeng) are white. Not a brown person to be seen. And every last single one of them is as racist as hell.

I am not denying in the least that there was a huge uptick in anti-Asian violence during Covid. There absolutely was. But literally every white person they meet in this calls them names, spits on them etc. I noticed even other Asian American reviewers of this book commenting about it. Also we're meant to believe that there were hundreds of murdered Asians during the first year of Covid in the city (not just the few the trio cleaned up after). Did you know NYC has their murder stats online by race? Now you do. There were only about a dozen (which is enough). I went looking not so much to prove her wrong (I mean this is fiction and the author is clearly working through her own trauma here) but I was curious to know if it was far worse than I thought it was. This book was highly recommended by a lot of horror book bloggers and if you look around I'm in a minority in disliking this but I did dislike Cora so much I'm gun shy about trying other books by Baker even though they sound exactly like something I would like. And thank you to Auntie Zeng, Yifei and Harvey for giving me someone to root for in this. (and looking at the length of this, apparently I'm working through something here too)



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The Murder at World's End by Ross Montgomery

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Probably a 4.5 read but I laughed out loud many times and I loved Stephen and Decima so rounding up. Stephen has had a rough start in life culminating in teen imprisonment for a crime (we don't know exactly what only that he might not be guilty of and we slowly peel back the layers until we get the whole story). He was close to his grandma who passed while he was in prison and now he's in need of a fresh start which he hopes to get as a footman at Tithe Hall.

Only no one told the head butler he was coming but they keep him on, in spite of his prison record because all hell is about to break loose. Halley's Comet is due back in the night sky of 1910 and people were in a panic (true. In fact one of the charming things about this book is the inclusion of actual news articles) Lord Conrad Welt fully believes it's the end of the world. He has gathered his family members, the abusive Edwin, the scheming Lettice and her grandson, the psychopath, Gilbert (still a child mind you) the drunken Jolyon and his friend and true believer in the comet's deadly portent, Doctor Muller. Miss Decima Stockingham, his aunt, is shunted off to the old nursery because she's a foul mouthed cantankerous old woman.

The plan is to seal everyone including the servants into their rooms with every door, keyhole, window and chimney sealed off so the 'deadly gases' won't get them. And boom, the perfect twist on the old locked room murder trope complete with the gothic setting of an island property off the coast of Cornwall that's often cut off by the tides.

Stephen is naturally desperate to solve the crime because the bumbling Inspector Jarvis would love to bundle him off as a likely scapegoat and his unlikely ally is Decima who is, as it turns out, a lady of science betrayed by the feminine morals and expectations of the time (i.e. she was kept from her passion to be house maid for her father, not allowed to marry). She is studying the comet and knows he's innocent. For her this is a game and she loves pissing off people. I read this thinking this is the old lady I want to be, realized she's only 20 years older than me and that I AM this cranky old bitch already for better or worse (and yes I'm an unmarried woman of science)

Aided by Temperance, who should have been Decima's maid, they try to scientifically uncover the murderer before a) they kill again b) escape the island and disappear. It was a fun mystery. I liked the red herrings. I did guess the killer but not the why so only half points to me. We're in Stephen's pov for the book but in spite of that Decima (and Mr Stokes the butler and Temperance not to mention Conrad's relatives) all feel well drawn.

I'm not sure I liked the epilogue per se but I liked where it ends for Stephen and Decima and I'm thrilled there is a second book coming.



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Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was odd. Even with the author's note warning about the script being from the view point of an eight year old girl, I found it jarring and nearly DNFed. Then I got invested. That said, this isn't a perfect book (but as you can see from reviews this is a divisive book). I did dither about what to rate it but since parts of it creeped me out, I rounded up. I am not easy to creep out.

Bela is a young girl living with Mom and Daddo in a perfectly normal subdivision. Mom works outside the home, Dad inside the home and in the bedroom closet is Other Mommy who was at first friendly with Bela but is always asking can I go into your heart? We, the adult reader, knows that can't possibly end well but Bela is unsure.

Other Mommy is beginning to look more and more like Mom and Daddo catches a whiff of her. Actual Mom thinks she sees something in the shadows and I will give this praise for not making no one believe Bela and we have 400 pages of her trying to fight on her own because I've seen that too many times.

No, one night Other Mommy doesn't bother to hide and the book kicks into high gear. Daddo has a pagan friend Lois who tries to help. Other people they hire try to help. They try to run and stay all over the place. I think you're getting the picture without me spoiling things. Other Mommy is creepy. I liked her, Bela, Daddo and Grandma Ruth. Mom...well, I'm not sure we're meant to like her much.

Some of it was done very well, especially the slow creep factor as Other Mommy gains in power and in territory. What worked less well was the time they were on the run. That seemed to go on and on to nearly a half dozen locations and one with a connection to Ursula (the mother) that really added nothing to the story and strained believability that this would ever happen. If some of that was edited down the pacing would have worked better (for me).

I wasn't sure why there isn't much punctuation for Bela's narrative. I get the short choppy sentences but not that. Also I didn't feel Bela was eight. She felt so much younger, maybe four or five. I think back to when I was eight. I'm in third grade, tackling multiplication tables and already reading Nancy Drew books. In my memory at least I feel older at eight than Bela.

Lastly as a matter of taste and without spoilers, I wasn't sure I liked the end. This was how I figured it would end by the first 100 pages. I was hoping for a twist or something but didn't get it. Is it a bad ending? Not really. Is it predictable? Yeah. Overall though I did like this one and am curious to see how it'll shake out in my horror book club's assessment of it.



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Manga Classics: The Jungle Book by Crystal S. Chan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


i've mentioned in other reviews there is this big trend in adapting western classics in manga styles. If you only know The Jungle Book from the Disney movie you don't really know the Jungle Book, at least not fully. Mowgli and his jungle friends are only first three stories. It's actually a collection of seven short stories.

These days Rudyard Kipling would probably be considered a problematic creator ditto his subject matter but it was written in the time period (and about it) of intense colonization of India. In the case of Mowgli you don't see much about that. White people aren't in the story. Mowgli's Brothers and Kaa's hunting are mostly about Mowgli and the wolf pack (which is a bit darker than I remember the Disney movie but to be fair that's many decades ago and most of what I remember is Louis Prima's I wanna Be Like You bop). Tiger Tiger might be the most interesting in that it shows Mowgli isn't really at home in jungle or village but at least there is one decent person in the village (the whole love story thing from the animation isn't in the book, sorry, spoilers I guess)

But that means 4 stories aren't about Mowgli. They're not even really connected other than they're about animals. The White Seal is about two things perseverance and how much humans can suck. Kotick the white seal doesn't want to become someone's fur coat and while other seals think if you get killed by a human you deserve it. Kotick wants to find a place for his people to live free (I took from this that maybe Kipling wasn't a fan of the fur seal trade)

Toomai of the Elephants and Her Majesty's Servant are actually rather awful. The former is about a boy from a family of elephant trainers who wants to be able to go out and hunt up fresh ones so yay pro elephant in servitude (eye roll but yes it was a part of life back then in India) Skip that one unless you're up for a lot of art of elephants in leg chains and being so scared of humans they won't disobey. The servant one I can't even remember and I read it last night. It felt unfinished.

That leaves only book 5 Rikki Tikki Tavi. This is probably one of my favorites. I remember the animation coming out when I was a little girl. I loved Rikki Tikki. It's also the sweetest and most hopeful story in the bunch. Young Teddy and his parents save Rikki Tikki (the mongoose) from nearly dying and he repays them by sticking around and saving them from cobras and other snakes.

I liked the art in this. It felt like it fit. That said I'm glad it's a library book and not one I bought (though I pretty much say that with this entire manga classics line)



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Brimstone Hollow by Archer Sullivan

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A solid 4.5 read for me but I rounded up because I love Annie so much. It is so refreshing to have a female PI who isn't there as comic relief and also is strong without embodying more toxic masculinity than the men around her. That said she's ex special investigator with the Air Force and is a muy thai boxer in the past. She's smart, strong and Appalachian which is relevant here.

Annie is asked to investigate the death of Ezra King by his estranged daughter, Katie. She hasn't seen her father in decades but when she was told of his death she found the fact that the snake handling preacher died from a snakebite and was buried without any autopsy or anyone looking for next of kin within a day. She just wants Annie to be sure nothing hinky really happened so off to rural Kentucky Annie goes in Honey, her vintage Datsun Z (which was practically a character in her own right in book one).

Annie didn't think there was much to see until someone brings trouble to her door. No one would do that if there wasn't something to hide, right? One thing Archer Sullivan excels at is giving the supporting cast distinct and interesting personalities. We have Will, the preacher in training who worshiped at Ezra's feet, the Shepard family and their King of Weed leader, Chief Dishman who is the local police chief who isn't fond of Annie at first but isn't a ridiculous hardnose about it either. He is no doubt the most endearing of the characters. Thelma the church account, Gavin, Dishman's up and coming office, Zelda, owner of the local diner and Katie's childhood friend and Hollis the owner and nebnose of the local hotel.

Sounds cluttered right? Not at all. The crime(s) and the investigation are engaging as is Annie. I did figure it out (mostly, the ending surprised me) but that isn't too surprising. I have decades of mystery reading under my belt and it was no less enjoyable for it. This little town is great and if I had had the time I would have devoured this in one setting. My only regret is I didn't get this review done on time (but thanks for the arc, Netgalley).

So why 4.5 vs an enthusiastic 5 star? It was a bit repetitive here and there.

And oh, like book one there's this whiff of the paranormal. Is it real? Is it hypnogogia? Annie would say the latter but it's a nice added layer to the rich story. Can't wait for book three.



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Half Moon Bay by Jonathan Kellerman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


2.5 read, rounded up for Alex Delaware nostalgia. I used to really like Kellerman but this was meh (it's also the first time reading anything in partnership with his son). I didn't see the first two books in this series and it sounded interesting as Clay works for the coroner's office. Doing what, who the heck knows? It is never clear what he actually does and much more time is spent on an off the books project than the one he's assigned two.

So yes, there are two mysteries, one that spurred on the other. Sleep deprived Clay - he and his partner are trying to get their sleep regression baby on a sleep cycle - is called out to Berkley's campus as bones have been found. It turns out it's an infant wrapped up with a little glass eye as if off a toy. This sparks three things.

1. The archaeology student who was there decides this had to be an Indigenous grave in spite of modern wrappings and later DNA from the baby proving the baby is of European descent and she starts up a protest movement that does nothing but add page after page of the most tedious prose. It is boring as heck and adds zero to the overall story. This is where being a long time bestseller works against the story because I swear editors stop editing when you have an author you know will be a megahit. This whole storyline could have been dropped and we'd lose nothing. I can't even tell you why they never even presented the evidence as to why this couldn't be Indigenous bones (which yes I do believe should be repatriated)

2. Starts the actual investigation into who this baby is and since (mild spoiler) we have the DNA, the find the baby boy's birth father as he's a White Supremacist in prison and now they have to find the mother but the whole White Supremacist family are unhelpful jerks. And again oh the need of an editor doing their actual job. For some reason they don't just say he's a racist and his sons run a racist blog/podcast. No, they go on for pages!!! about all the terrible racist, homophobic, misogynistic stuff that Daddy said. Why? It added zero other than to make me wonder about the authors. You can tell us he's a racist without giving us endless examples. We'll believe you.

3. Before the DNA is back on the bones (you can't gender prepubescent bones with any accuracy) someone contacts Clay because he thinks it might be his sister. Since a friend of Clay's had suggested him to this man (who is a wealthy tech dude) Clay agrees to look into it. And honestly this is the biggest part of the mystery, not the actual bones found.

Clay goes along trying to find out if this little girl (who would now be in her 50s) is dead or alive and that's the main thrust of the story (which telegraphs its ending about midway).

It's plodding. It doesn't make me want to go back and read the first two or read on to the next book (who knows I may have it on the shelf). If I wasn't reading this for a reading challenge I might not even have finished it. Kellerman has been much better than this.



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The Secret of Red Gate Farm by Carolyn Keene

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I read most of the Nancy Drews that were available in the 70s when I was a child. A friend knowing I loved Nancy sent me this. The 'original' Nancy 'as you remember it' (not unless you're 100 at this point) What a lot of people don't know is during the McCarthy era, Nancy was gutted out under the guise of removing the racism but really under that particular brand of White Nationalism, all characters of Color, and Jews were simply white washed, 'problem solved' as far as the 1950s were concerned. But they also took the opportunity to turn independent Nancy into a 'more acceptable' brand of young lady, more subservient, more dependent on men, hence the rise of her boyfriend Ned into a more prominent role.

This Originals series puts Nancy back to what she was intended to be: an independent adventurer. But yes, since it was written in the 30s you have to expect a level of casual racism thankfully not tolerated today. There is also a strong vein of classism while we're at it. Nancy and her friends, the cousins George and Bess are all rich girls who don't need to work. And oddly another thing added in the 50s was a deeper fat phobia. Bess is 'plump' (not according to the illustrations she's not) which she accepts and frets about in the original a little but it's far more pronounced in the ones I read as a girl.

Anyhow, history lesson aside, let's get into this. Honestly it's a 3 star read but I gave it an extra star because of Nancy's historical importance. She was one of the first times girls saw themselves as something other than to proper up a husband and respect men always. Nancy, George and Bess run across Millie on the train where she's so hungry she faints. She tells them she needs a job in town in order to help save her grandmother's titular Red Gate Farm, at least until they can get it set up for borderers who want to experience farm life (that was a thing in the 30s? Farm tourism is hot right now, so that took me by surprise)

Millie, driven around by Nancy, tries to get a job but fails. (and the run across the Chinese girl who was rude to Nancy and friends earlier, and yes there was some racism there). They decide to go to the farm with Millie and help her save it (remember, rich girls with nothing better to do).

Meanwhile on the farm up near a cave system is a Nature Cult (note the cover with the KKK style robes. I was surprised it wasn't the KKK) Naturally they're the villains of the piece. It's not much of a mystery really but it was fun. Rather preposterous to an adult reader but keeping in mind the time period and the intended audience it was fun.





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The Séance Garden by Juliet Blackwell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This stand alone (or maybe not) mystery toes the line of also being a paranormal gothic horror. Professor Harper Grae has lost a bet to her graduate school friend, Tariq and they're going on a ghost tour that concludes at the infamous Perles Mansion now owned by the eccentric artist Delilah Mason and this begins the one problematic theme for me (more on that later). Naturally being a mystery, you know where this is going: the tour ends up stumbling over Delilah murdered in the garden.

Harper, fearing Tariq who turns out to have know Delilah will be blamed, starts helping with the investigation unofficially. It doesn't help that her PhD was in witchcraft/death rituals and folklore because there is a ritual element. She's also written papers on poison which da da daaaah, plays a role.

Other suspects include the contractor (Delilah's current lover), her ex-husband, Sigrid the witch who was helping her with herbal healing, Highbaugh the gallery owner who showcased her work, and her overprotective brother, Asher. And oh, right, the ghosts of the house. Into this mess are two of Harper's students, Blanca and Jenny, who also have a true crime podcast and have an interest in Delilah's death but also the contaminated grounds of the defunct army base Delilah's ex is trying to turn into exclusive housing.

Dovetailed into this is Soren and Isabella Perles' history which is something of a mirror to Delilah and Asher. I think it worked quite well. I liked the characters and the resolution made a lot of sense. Harper is forty at the beginning of the book and having to start all over after her partner left her and her not getting tenure at her last college so she's at a small college in Monterey Bay reconnecting with Tariq who does jellyfish research (cool).

The detective in this seemed a bit under developed but on the other hand, he's not ridiculously pig headed about blaming her or super solicitous of getting help like you see in some amateur sleuth mysteries. The paranormal aspects have a good gothic feel to it. Is it ghosts? (Harper isn't a believer) Is it psychology? Time will tell. Over all I really liked it so why not five stars? It's not much of a spoiler so I'll put it here.

Also content warning - murder (naturally), mentions of incest, mentions of child death

So what bugged me is how Harper's college handled the ghost tour. The author isn't an academic but her sister is (almost afraid to ask where given how academia is portrayed here). As for me I was a medical doctor and is now a professor (who does research herbal medicine) and I can honestly say I have never heard of a college threatening a professor's job because they went on a ghost tour. It would be one thing if it was just her 'nemesis' saying it because whatever but the dean isn't happy either. I have been on my college's tenure committee for over a decade and I can tell you never once have we cared that someone went on a ghost tour. I give ghost tours and I'm a tenured school of science professor. No one cares. Maybe there's an uptight university that might (I'm thinking religious ones but that's not this) And what bugged me most about it, is Harper fears this so why in the world would she ever agreed to go on a ghost tour? If you wanted to threaten her tenure, her being in the off-limits army base or being around crime scenes would be much more believable. And since nothing comes of it, it felt utterly unnecessary but that was my only big problem with the book



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When the Sky Fell on Splendor by Emily Henry

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I think this book was a bit confused as to what it wanted to be. Alien 'abduction,' childhood grief, and whatever the heck that end was? Paranormal? In some ways I feel for The Ordinaries, a group of friends at the cusp of adulthood, almost ready to graduate and go off to school. They've grown up in a small town in Ohio where everyone has some tangential relationship to the Mill which is no more and the town is dying. Been there, lived that.

Franny and Arthur are siblings whose brother Mark is in a coma thanks to a mill accident, tearing their family up. Sofia is Franny's friend who wants to be a lawyer some day. Nick also lost someone in the mill accident and his mother had a nervous break down (at least this YA is creative about getting parents out of the way), he is a shoplifting/compulsive liar trying to keep his family afloat, Remy the sheriff's son and his wealthy cousin, Levi (whose parents are away on an extended trip)

Together they break into the Jenkins house when a bright light of something falling from the sky envelops them all, transforming them somehow. They naturally think it's aliens especially when Black Mailbox Bill starts emailing Franny with his conspiracy theories. And there's Wayne, the man who was blamed for the accident who is now a hostile hermit near Franny and Arthur's home.

The bulk of the book is them trying to figure out their abilities, what to do with them, how to get rid of them, what if the government comes to disappear them? What if Wayne is out to kill them and end the world? It's interwoven with the accident that ruined their families and their deep grief. These two don't always mesh well with the latter, while good, slowing the pacing down.

I wasn't sure about the ending. It felt a little too paranormal for the otherwise Sci-Fi setting. It's a good read but not great. I liked the characters (except maybe Arthur who never really came alive for me) but it also felt overly long in places.



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