This week, I wrote two book reviews: An American Beauty, by Shana Abe and The Ferryman, by Justin Cronin (forthcoming). An American Beauty was a decent historical fiction read, although the MC felt really distant. And The Ferryman….well, I’ve decided that Justin Cronin’s writing just isn’t for me. The first 2/3rds of this book felt very “done” to me, like I’d read something similar a few times before. The last third just felt like confusing chaos. So, yeah, I’ll probably be skipping his stuff in the future.
Zora has committed every inch of her life to establishing her thriving DC bookstore, making it into a pillar of the community, and she just hasn’t had time for romance. But when a mystery author she’s been crushing on for years agrees to have an event at her store, she starts to rethink her priorities. Lawrence is every bit as charming as she imagined, even if his understanding of his own books seems just a bit shallow. When he asks her out after his reading, she’s almost elated enough to forget about the grumpy guy who sat next to her making snide comments all evening. Apparently the grouch is Lawrence’s best friend, Reid, but she can’t imagine what kind of friendship that must be. They couldn’t be more different.
But as she starts seeing Lawrence, and spending more and more time with Reid, Zora finds first impressions can be deceiving. Reid is smart and thoughtful—he’s also interested. After years of avoiding dating, she suddenly has two handsome men competing for her affection. But even as she struggles to choose between them, she can’t shake the feeling that they’re both hiding something—a mystery she’s determined to solve before she can find her HEA.
This started off good: I loved Zora herself and all of her ambition and drive to give back to her community. The friendship between her, Emma, and grandma Marion was fantastic! The eye candy—Lawrence and Reid—wasn’t bad, either.
But then I realized just how hypocritical Zora, her granny, and the other characters were. You can’t make a big production of praying before every meal and mention God in conversation—and think it’s okay to be sleeping with two different guys you barely know. You can’t have Zora’s family be so proud of her and encourage her to live out her own dreams and goals—and have granny beat her over the head with mentions of great-grandkids every other breath. And Zora, who is supposedly so self-aware and alert to the tricks of guys in the dating scene….notices the massive red flags both these guys are throwing up—and chooses to believe they’re not actually red flags at all. Um…what? So, despite starting off so promisingly, this really should have been a DNF.
Taj McCoy is from Oakland. Zora Books Her Happily Ever After is her new novel.
(Galley courtesy of Harlequin/MIRA in exchange for an honest review.)
1867, Richmond, Virginia: Though she wears the same low-cut purple gown that is the uniform of all the girls who work at Worsham’s gambling parlor, Arabella stands apart. It’s not merely her statuesque beauty and practiced charm. Even at seventeen, Arabella possesses an unyielding grit, and a resolve to escape her background of struggle and poverty.
Collis Huntington, railroad baron and self-made multimillionaire, is drawn to Arabella from their first meeting. Collis is married and thirty years her senior, yet they are well-matched in temperament, and flirtation rapidly escalates into an affair. With Collis’s help, Arabella eventually moves to New York, posing as a genteel, well-to-do Southern widow. Using Collis’s seed money and her own shrewd investing instincts, she begins to amass a fortune.
Their relationship is an open secret, and no one is surprised when Collis marries Arabella after his wife’s death. But “The Four Hundred”—the elite circle that includes the Astors and Vanderbilts—have their rules. Arabella must earn her place in Society—not just through her vast wealth, but with taste, style, and impeccable behavior. There are some who suspect the scandalous truth, and will blackmail her for it. And then there is another threat—an unexpected, impossible romance that will test her ambition, her loyalties, and her heart . . .
The first 20% of this was a bit slow, and I almost put it down, but it did pick up. Arabella is an interesting character: she’s very distant and manipulative, and sometimes comes across as cold. She even felt distant towards her family to me, except towards her son. I had to admire all that she accomplished, but using people came as second nature to her, so she’s not the type of person I like. I did like how the author managed to not give away her complete history until towards the end of the book.
Shana Abe is a bestselling author. An American Beauty is her newest novel.
(Galley courtesy of Kensington Books in exchange for an honest review.)
I ended up working an extra day this week—and all five days were mentally exhausting—so I only wrote one book review this week, Pieces of Me, by Kate McLaughlin. (Interesting read, but it struck me as a bit sugar-coated.) I also DNFed three books (again), Where Coyotes Howl, The Dutch Orphan, and Under the Cover of Mercy. The first one, I DNFed because there was no conflict in the first 25%, the second, the POV was too distant for my taste, and the last one, the MC felt a bit haughty and distant.
When eighteen-year-old Dylan wakes up, she’s in an apartment she doesn’t recognize. The other people there seem to know her, but she doesn’t know them – not even the pretty, chiseled boy who tells her his name is Connor. A voice inside her head keeps saying that everything is okay, but Dylan can’t help but freak out. Especially when she borrows Connor’s phone to call home and realizes she’s been missing for three days.
Dylan has lost time before, but never like this.
Soon after, Dylan is diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder, and must grapple not only with the many people currently crammed inside her head, but that a secret from her past so terrible she’s blocked it out has put them there. Her only distraction is a budding new relationship with Connor. But as she gets closer to finding out the truth, Dylan wonders: will it heal her or fracture her further?
I can’t decide on this: on the one hand, I loved how supportive Dylan’s family and best friend were of her illness and how they tried to help her. On the other, that struck me as not realistic. There’s no way that every single person in Dylan’s life would have been super supportive and bend over backwards to do everything she thought she needed while going through her diagnosis. Connor especially wasn’t believable to me, being someone she’d just met and completely understanding of what’s going on—even when one of her alters hits on him and another is a guy?
Great writing here, and the author managed to draw me into even the alters’ personalities and POVs, which I would have thought was impossible. This was an engrossing read, I’m just not sure how believable it is.
Kate McLaughlin lives in Connecticut. Pieces of Me is her newest novel.
(Galley courtesy of St. Martin’s Press in exchange for an honest review.)
If we’re lucky, we all encounter at least one person whose life elevates and inspires our own. For Daniel Wallace, that was his longtime friend and brother-in-law, William Nealy. Seemingly perfect, impossibly cool, William was James Dean, Clint Eastwood, and MacGyver all rolled into one: an acclaimed outdoorsman, a famous cartoonist, an accomplished author, a master of all he undertook. William was the ideal that Daniel sought to emulate, and the person who gave him the courage to become a writer.
But when William took his own life at age forty eight, Daniel’s heartbreak led him to commit a grievous act of his own, a betrayal that took him down a path into the tortured recesses of William’s past. Eventually a new picture emerged of a man with too many secrets and too much shame to bear.
I wanted to like this. I read 20% of it, and I enjoyed the voice and the action—but I did not like the narrator/author at all. Selfish and self-absorbed people are not my cup of tea, and the narrator was both of these things, so I just could not stand to read any more of this. I get that a certain amount of self-absorption is inherent in memoirs, but the tone and amount of it present in this just wasn’t for me.
(Galley courtesy of Algonquin Books in exchange for an honest review.)
Beth Howell needs to find her dowry, post haste. After her good-for-nothing first husband married her―and two other women, unbeknownst to them all―she’s left financially ruined and relegated to living with her brother, who cares more for his horses than he does his blood relatives. If Beth fails to acquire her funds, her brother will force her to marry someone fifty years her senior and missing half his teeth. She’d prefer to avoid that dreadful fate. But her now-deceased husband, Meri, absconded with her money mere days after their illegitimate marriage. To find it, Beth will have to leave town and retrace Meri’s steps if she’s to take her future into her own hands.
Julian Raleah, Marquess of Grayson, cares not a whit for social norms and generally growls at anyone in his path. Grayson has had a heart of stone ever since his engagement to Beth Howell went down in flames―long before she married that cad, Meri, and sealed her own fate for good. But now she’s on his doorstep, asking for use of his carriage and accompaniment on the hunt to find her lost dowry. Surely Grayson cannot go on the road with the woman who has occupied his thoughts for the past decade. Yet, knowing she needs him, how can he resist helping her this one last time? And maybe that’s just enough time to change the ending to their over-too-soon love story.
Man, Beth’s brother was a real jerk! And his buddies weren’t exactly prizes, either. I’ve enjoyed The Widow Rules books very much, and I loved this one, too. I liked Beth’s determination to win through on her own—although she might have taken it a smidge too far at times. For someone who didn’t really care what the ton thought of her, she sure changed her actions because of them several times. I really liked Julian and his flirtatious, always-kind personality. This was a book I read straight through in one sitting, so if you need a weekend read, grab this.
Janna MacGregor lives in Kansas City. How to Best a Marquess is her newest novel.
(Galley courtesy of St. Martin’s Press in exchange for an honest review.)
Tamsin Lark didn’t ask to be a Hollower. As a mortal with no magical talent, she was never meant to break into ancient crypts, or compete with sorceresses and Cunningfolk for the treasures inside. But after her thieving foster father disappeared without so much as a goodbye, it was the only way to keep herself—and her brother, Cabell—alive.
Ten years later, rumors are swirling that her guardian vanished with a powerful ring from Arthurian legend. A run-in with her rival Emrys ignites Tamsin’s hope that the ring could free Cabell from a curse that threatens both of them. But they aren’t the only ones who covet the ring.
As word spreads, greedy Hollowers start circling, and many would kill to have it for themselves. While Emrys is the last person Tamsin would choose to partner with, she needs all the help she can get to edge out her competitors in the race for the ring. Together, they dive headfirst into a vipers’ nest of dark magic, exposing a deadly secret with the power to awaken ghosts of the past and shatter her last hope of saving her brother. . . .
I read this entire novel in one sitting—yes, all almost-500-pages—if that tells you anything. I found the setting and worldbuilding fascinating, with the mixture of fantastical elements and the mundane everyday swirled together. Tamsin is frequently kind of a jerk, even if I can understand why she’s so prickly. I loved her relationship with her brother, and the snark between her and Emyrs was great. Some of this was creepy as heck, but I loved what the author did with the King Arthur mythos, and I would read the next book in a hot second.
Alexandra Bracken is a bestselling author. Silver in the Bone is her newest novel.
(Galley courtesy of Random House in exchange for an honest review.)
There is often trouble of a mythical sort in Bath. The booksellers who police the Old World keep a careful watch there, particularly on the entity that inhabits the ancient hot spring.
This time trouble comes from the discovery of a sorcerous map, leading left-handed bookseller Merlin into great danger, requiring a desperate rescue attempt from his sister, the right-handed bookseller Vivien, and art student Susan Arkshaw, who is still struggling to deal with her own recently discovered magical heritage.
The map takes the trio to a place separated from this world, maintained by deadly sorcery and guarded by monstrous living statues. But this is only the beginning. To unravel the secrets of a murderous Ancient Sovereign, the booksellers must investigate centuries of disappearances and deaths. If they do not stop her, she will soon kill again. And this time, her target is not an ordinary mortal.
I think I might have enjoyed the first book in this series a bit more than this one, but it was close. Merlin is, of course, my favorite character again, as he’s so over-the-top and just fun in general. I found the mythology here a bit convoluted and confusing, but the world itself was fascinating. This was a solid adventure to read.
Garth Nix lives in Sidney. The Sinister Booksellers of Bath is his newest novel.
(Galley courtesy of HarperCollins in exchange for an honest review.)
When Edwin, Delaney’s boss at the Cracked Spine bookstore, leaves town on secret business, Delaney is called upon to guide his yearly literary tour around Edinburgh. But on the first night of the tour, at the inn where the tour group is staying, the inn manager falls—or is pushed—off the roof of the inn, and killed. Then, one of the tour members disappears, leaving a trail of puzzles in her wake.
In a race against the clock, Delaney sets out on the expedition of her life, following clues around Edinburgh to get to the bottom of this mystery. Exploring sights from Greyfriars Bobby to the Royal Mile to the Sir Walter Scott Monument, she’ll have to put the pieces together quickly, or the bookstore’s survival could be on the line…as well as her own.
This was a solid read. I love the bookstore setting—and the family of employees there. I feel like the people on the tour, and Delaney herself, were willfully overlooking some obvious tells and warning signs here, and I really didn’t find it believable about her calling the inspector every other second, but this was a fun read, with a lot of cool details about Edinburgh.
Paige Shelton lives in Arizona. Fateful Words is her newest novel.
(Galley courtesy of St. Martin’s Press in exchange for an honest review.)
Tomorrow Is Another Day 