My Review: The Dead I Know by Scot Gardner
Kicked off this month with a reread of one of my retrospective favorites of 2016. This is one of the best YA funeral home books I've ever read, and one of the few books to actually bring a tear or two to my eyes. This was the first book in my funeral home mini series I had over the course of the month, and ended up remaining as one of my favorites. This book is about a boy who is a sleepwalker haunted by horrific dreams and becomes an apprentice to a local mortician who really takes him under his wing.
My Review: Things I'm Seeing Without You by Peter Bognanni
It's amazing how quickly an author can fall in my eyes. I was really impressed with The House of Tomorrow, a book that surpassed all my expectations, and avoided many of the pitfalls of YA fiction. With this book, Peter Bognanni has decided to john the ranks of David Arnold and Scott Stambach and Matthew Quick and all the other John Green imitators to write a disappointing teen book, a book that isn't original in the slightest. It's not as bad as, say, Mosquitoland or Every Exquisite Thing, but in comparison to The House of Tomorrow, it was just sad. Things I'm Seeing Without You was the second book in my funeral home mini series since it's about a girl dealing with grief through her father's funeral planning business, though it's done in a horribly inconsistent way.
My Review: The Boy in the Black Suit by Jason Reynolds
The Boy in the Black Suit is a better book than I remember it to be, something that almost never happens. But damn, Matt Miller is just such a great character, it's hard for me to not love this sweet, short little book about a boy who goes to work in a neighborhood funeral home after his mother died. I'm happy that my funeral home series gave me the chance to revisit it.
My Review: Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
Well, this wasn't nearly as good as I thought it would be. Manhattan Beach is Jennifer Egan's first foray into historical fiction and it shows, given that this is a hot mess of a book, I'm not quite sure how I stuck with it in fact. It was confusing and not really worth my time in the end. For those still curious, Manhattan Beach is about a girl and her father, the father works in organized crime during the Great Depression and the girl becomes the first female diver during WWII.
My Review: The Darkest Corners by Kara Thomas
I don't know how I feel about Kara Thomas now. Admittedly, I was probably jumping the gun when I declared her to be potentially my new favorite YA thriller writer in my Little Monsters review, because I loved that book but this one just wasn't as good as Little Monsters. In fact, it reminded me a lot of Dark Places by Gillian Flynn, with the same basic plot and I liked this one just about as much as Dark Places. This is about girl who is investigating the disappearance of one of her friends, a disappearance that has a lot in common with one of her sister's best friend, who was found murdered shortly after. It was alright, but I look forward to see what's next for Kara Thomas, hoping it's more along the same lines as Little Monsters as opposed to The Darkest Corners.
My Review: Putting Makeup on Dead People by Jen Violi
I first started reading this book 3 years ago and never finished it. And now, reading the whole thing, I can see why. It just wasn't really what it advertised itself to be and was very much a YA product of its times, reading like a wish-fulfillment novel and had very heavy-handed messages. It just wasn't as deep or subtle as The Dead I Know or as laugh-out-loud funny as The Boy in the Black Suit. The really only redeeming thing about this novel, which is about a girl getting over the death of her father so she decides to pursue a career in mortuary science, is that the ending was really nice.
My Review: Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
Norwegian Wood is either everyone's favorite or least favorite Murakami book. I haven't read anything else by Murakami, but I loved Norwegian Wood even though I didn't really expect to. Toru and Midori ended up being two of my favorite characters ever, and their exchanges never failed to make me laugh. The way Murakami captured Tokyo in the 60s fascinated me. What else can I say, beyond the fact that I loved it?
My Review: The Burning Girl by Claire Messud
Don't be fooled by the pretty writing or seemingly adultness of The Burning Girl, this is a fairly run of the mill story about two friends who find themselves growing apart. This is a tired story and Messud does not do much new with it. While reading I often thought of Emily Fridlund's History of Wolves, and this novel had the same effect as that one for me, except The Burning Girl was less interesting.
My Review: Belle Epoque by Elizabeth Ross
Sometimes I like to read some fluffy historical fiction just to unwind a bit, and Belle Epoque has been on my radar for a long time, since every time I go to my library that book stared down at me from above the YA Rs-Ss bookcase. I finally picked it up because I really, really wanted to read some historical fiction and this was the only one I could find that wasn't about WWII and I didn't hate the plot. But at the same time, it wasn't really as great as it could have been, and I liked it (or didn't like it) about as much as I liked (or didn't like) Gilt. Belle Epoque is about a girl who works in service where rich women hire plain girls to make themselves look better. Good idea, mediocre execution.
Another Picoult reread, because her books are just really easy to reread. I actually remember liking this book more than I did on my reread. In fact, when I read it for the first time I gave it a 9 out of 10 (five stars) a way higher score than it deserved upon rereading. In fact, I actually used to consider it better than My Sister's Keeper, though now I believe that My Sister's Keeper is the superior novel. Picoult is one of those authors who just writes the same book over and over again, whether or not she's successful at it is up to you. To me, her books are great when you don't want to think too much on them, this novel included.
I never wrote a full review for this one because, well, I just forgot too. I read one chapter a week for a 2 months because I found that, as much as I liked the writing style, I couldn't take more than one chapter at a time. Still, I really enjoyed Rollo May's writing and this thoughts on the act of creativity and how it fits into human society. It made me feel inspired to start writing again.
The Girl Who Could Fly has a very special place in my heart, being one of my favorite books as a child, and also I swear to God Piper and Conrad were my first OTP. I felt the need to reread this book, and was shocked to find out how short it was- when I was a kid, this book seemed like 300 pages. But I still really liked it, mostly because of how surprisingly dark it is for a kids' book (that probably explains why I read the books I do), has a really easy to read writing style, and also there's the nostalgic atmosphere. The darkness and even light body horror in The Girl Who Could Fly led me to novels like Unwind by Neal Shusterman and, later on, books like The Butterfly Garden and Marina, all of which I count among my favorite books to date.
My Review: Music of the Ghosts by Vaddey Ratner
Music of the Ghosts is a gorgeously lyrical novel about Cambodia in the wake of the nightmare that was the Pol Pot regime, something I know very little about. This novel, while it does drag in some places, is also extremely atmospheric with beautiful descriptions of Cambodia and a quietness, a calmness that makes the horrors of the massacre of Cambodians stand out all the more. Highly recommended.
My Review: The Last Four Days of Paddy Buckley by Jeremy Massey
If not for Norwegian Wood, this would be my favorite book of the month, because I kind of loved it. It was funny, it was entertaining, it was dark, it was endearing, it was just great. It reminded me a lot of my favorite contemporary novel ever, I Am the Messenger, especially with the characters of Paddy and Ed. This thriller about a guy who works in a funeral home and accidentally runs over a famous mobster, quickly became one of my favorite mysteries ever.
I used my DNF this month on The Museum at the End of the World by John Metcalf, not to be confused with John Metcalfe. I liked the first story okay, but the writing style was extremely confusing and I had a hard time getting into the story at all. It was the kind of book I couldn't focus on at all and yet I was extremely reluctant to actually DNF it. In the end, I just put it down and never picked it back up again. Can't say I'm too sad about that, even if it does have a really great title.
My Review: Salaam, Love by Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi
Salaam, Love does an interesting thing in that it captures a group of people who little is said about, except bad things. Muslim men. Whereas Muslim women are often given a voice, Muslim men are regulated to the sidelines. And that's what makes Salaam, Love an interesting read. While I can't say I loved it, though I rarely love anthologies anyway, I still enjoyed reading it and getting into the minds of these Muslim men on their experiences with love.
My Review: The Midnight Dance by Nikki Katz
I've always been captivated by ballet stories, and so The Midnight Dance was an obvious pick up for me, being, or at least I thought it was, a contemporary thriller about a ballet school in Italy. Instead, it was a historical fiction (not the bad part) with some thriller elements but also equally as many steampunk ones, and it was only kind of about ballet- the ballet parts were added on and not really elaborated as to why they were there. I think this was supposed to be a 12 Dancing Princesses retelling of some kind, though it was never really advertised as one. This is a complete miss, and one I'd advise you to pass up on.
My Review: The Five Daughters of the Moon by Leena Likitalo
My last fiction novel of the month was The Five Daughters of the Moon, a long ass title for a short fantasy novel. I didn't hate this book the way I was expecting to, in fact, I didn't mind it at all. It was a decent enough take on the Russian Revolution and the story behind the Russian Revolution, although admittedly it could have been better. The writing was also better than I thought it would be, although it is quite obviously translated. I guess I'd recommend this Russian-inspired fantasy novel, and it's pretty cheap, too.
My Review: The Victorian Book of the Dead by Chris Woodyard
And for my last book of the month, my Halloween book, The Victorian Book of the Dead, a fun coffee table book about Victorian death practices with some pretty great stories about mourning and also the interesting deaths Victorians managed to succumb to. Highly recommended- it's also got some great illustrations!
Page total: 5,444
Average rating: 6.5/10 (rounded down by not much) (not counting rereads)
Genre breakdown: 6 contemporaries
6 historical fiction
3 nonfiction (1 historical, 1 anthology, 1 psychological)
2 mystery-thrillers
1 fantasy
1 science fiction
Of those 11 were adult, 7 were YA, and 1 was children's
I read 19 books this month, 1 less than I did in September but still better than I have in all summer. I have little hope for November, given that I'll be really busy all month, but I'm hoping to use it as a catch-up month to get to all the books I've been putting off, like Donna Tartt's The Secret History. We'll see how it goes.
*e-books
No comments:
Post a Comment