Reviews and Comments

In Wolf at the Table, Adam Rapp spins a violent family saga based on elements of his mother’s life. Although this book contains more than its share of murders—including appearances from John Wayne Gacy—I found this book to be a fascinating exploration of how encounters with violence and evil can send people on such wildly different trajectories. Even better, the characters in this book aren’t simple fodder for inspiration. The characters are achingly fallible...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Zhenia is content with her life as Katya Apekina’s emotionally stunning novel, Mother Doll, opens. She has a happy marriage to an actor and, even if her own acting career didn’t pan out, her work as a Russian translator is satisfying. She and her husband gleefully comment on their carefree childlessness only to discover, a few days later, that Zhenia is pregnant. Her pregnancy sparks a roller coaster of revelation about what truly brings happiness and a struggle over what it means to be a mother...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Fourteen Days, edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston and written by 36 authors under the auspices of the Authors Guild, is the first Covid 19 book I have read. Until now, I haven’t been able to read any of the books I’ve seen reviewed that take place during Covid lockdowns. What got me this time was, first, authors I trust to be thoughtful and original and, second, that this book uses a similar structure to one of the great plague novels of Western history, The Decameron. A Covid book in which the characters escape their circumstances through stories? I can get on board with that...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Sir Lawrence Linwood’s unlamented death summons his three adopted children from Peru, France, and London for a funeral and a will reading. There were already hints at the beginning of Christopher Huang’s intriguing novel, Unnatural Ends, that there is something sinister about the Linwoods but these hints turn into red flags when Sir Lawrence leaves instructions in his will that his entire estate will go to whichever one of them solves his murder. That stunner is just the first of many bombshells...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

Robert Jackson Bennett takes the classic pairing of irritable genius detective and neophyte assistant and transplants it to a wild fantasy setting in The Tainted Cup. Sometimes when I read a book, I get the feeling that the author knocked their own socks off while writing it. The world Bennett has created here is a feat of worldbuilding. The scenes exude a sense of history and the descriptions bring everything to vibrant life in my mind’s eye. This book is a fun ride, even if some characters aren’t as fully realized as the settings...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

At the time of writing, the current population of New York City is 8.468 million people. In 2018, 3.1 million of these residents were immigrants. These 3.1 million—and the millions of immigrants before them, all the way back to the founding of New Amsterdam in 1624—brought their languages with them. In Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York, linguist Ross Perlin talks about New York City as an unexpected repository for the world’s languages, from the most widely spoken to some of the most rarely spoken. He highlights the work of staff and volunteers at the Endangered Languages Alliance to record and preserve languages on the rarer end of things...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

It’s been just over 100 years since the end of World War I. The last veterans have passed away and World War II has largely eclipsed what was called the Great War in a lot of Western minds. Katherine Arden’s heartbreaking historical fantasy, The Warm Hands of Ghosts, brings the horrors of the catastrophic First World War back to life through the eyes of a nurse and her soldier brother. Both characters search for each other in the wake of the Battle of Passchendaele (Third Battle of Ypres, July-November 1917) through figurative and literal hell...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Thomas Mullen dives deeply into the gray area between good and evil in The Rumor Game with two protagonists caught by conflicting loyalties in Boston, 1943: to truth and justice, to safety and pragmatism, to family ties and patriotism. Anne Lemire is a journalist struggling to make a name in the very sexist media world while FBI agent Devon Mulvey is fighting to uphold the law when so many others around him are more than happy to sweep things under the rug. Mullen drops our heroes into the thick things and it’s anyone’s guess what will happen next. More than once I thought about red strings and corkboards to keep track of the criminal schemes and shenanigans...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

I’ve put off writing this review because, even though I finished it nearly a week ago, I’m still not sure what to make of Liz Nugent’s novel, Strange Sally Diamond. Every time I thought the story was settling down, Nugent would throw a wild curve ball that knocked me off of my expectations. While I enjoyed the twists and turns, I’m still puzzled by the ending of the story. I feel a blend of satisfaction and uneasiness. I can’t recall any other book that left me with such a weird sense of pleasantly mixed emotions...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

Once again, I have been suckered in by a premise involving librarians in danger. Sadly, Tobias S. Buckell’s A Stranger in the Citadel fails to live up to the promise of the idea that librarians survive in a world that will burn anyone caught with a book or who demonstrates literacy. On the one hand, it’s full of too much detail to evoke the feel of folklore, where plot holes are readily forgiven as long as the story hits the right beats. On the other, there’s too little detail to give the impression of a fully-formed world for us readers to get immersed in...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

Shubnum Khan’s powerful, hypnotic novel, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, floored me. I feel like I climbed into the book and have only just emerged back into the world. This is definitely one of those books that I want all of my friends to read so that I can have someone to talk to about its themes and characters and setting...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

The Sonoros, we learn early in Elizabeth Gonzalez James’s violent meditation on the sins of the father The Bullet Swallower, have a long track record of rapaciousness, cruelty, and remorselessness. The opening section shows us how one member of the family killed scores in an effort to snatch every last bit of gold from the Sonoro family’s mine on the US-Mexico border in the mid-1800s. Unlike a lot of aristocratic monsters, however, the members of the family suffer disaster and poverty as often as they enjoy wealth and privilege. This split time narrative shows us how two scions of the Sonoro family face the long overdue repercussions of their fathers’ sins.

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

The traditional Christian wedding vows include provisions “for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health,” but they’re a little fuzzy on what to do when a spouse declares that they can communicate with the dead. Evelyn Hazard could use more concrete guidance when her husband makes just that declaration at the beginning of Anbara Salam’s troubling novel, Hazardous Spirits. The rest of the book sees Evelyn wavering between believing her husband and doubting him, dealing with disapproving relatives, enjoying the benefits of contact with rich spiritualists, and worrying if her own secrets are safe. I feel emotionally worn out after reading this book, but not entirely satisfied by its conclusion...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

While I think everyone has had a job that they were desperate to leave at some point in their life, no one has ever been as desperate as the eponymous protagonist of The Witch of Tophet County, the delightfully chaotic and entertaining novel by J.H. Schiller. The Witch only has a few weeks left to somehow get out of her contract with the Elder Gods that have taken over the world (the story is hilarious). If she can’t find a way out, she has to work for them forever or until her untimely death. Standing in the Witch’s way are a host of whacky distractions, clients who want a quick hex, and a mystery that only she can solve...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Revelle Lee is full of secrets. She never talks about her past. She never talks about why she’s so desperate to adopt a child. She doesn’t even talk about one of the languages she speaks and refuses to interpret for child protective services. It takes most of The Interpreter, by Brooke Robinson, for Revelle’s secrets to shake out. It will also take stalking, blackmail, and a lot of paranoia to loose those secrets...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.