If you're unfamiliar with the premise of THE CROW, it's the story of a young man named Eric who defies the laws of death itself for the sake of his vengeance, hunting down the criminals who murdered him, and then SA'd and murdered his fiancee as well. It's pretty horrifying, and very violent, and the story is incredibly dark and bleak.
Apparently the author's own fiancee was killed by a drunk driver when he was very young (eighteen, I think), and this graphic novel was an attempt to channel his feelings into a cathartic medium. You can really feel the raw anguish and hatred seeping through the pages, and at times, that can be very hard. The criminals are also horrible people who do horrible things, and we see them do some of them, which is also hard to read. Reading THE CROW gives you the idea that the world is a rather joyless and terrible place, where happiness is only fleeting, and evil basically runs rampantly unchecked.
It's hard not to fall in love with Eric, though. Even though he's pretentious and weird and violent, he's a 6'5" undead goth who is nice to cats and children and simps hard for his wife. So what if he wears bullets in his hair and carves a crown of thorns in his own chest? The only people who fall victim to his murder-sprees are Bad People Who Are Not Good(TM). He's better than most dark romance heroes.
I think the movie was better than the comic book, but the comic book isn't bad. If you're into gritty-looking art and very dark noir with goth overtones, you'll really enjoy THE CROW.
So I almost DNFed this in the beginning because I wasn't sure that I liked the writing style, but once I got used to the ornate and flowery prose and the slow beginning, I couldn't put this book down. THE END OF EVERYTHING is quietly devastating and absolutely heartbreaking to read. It's a coming of age story about grooming, girlhood, toxic masculinity, and the viciousness of first friendships. For almost the entire book, dread sat like a hot coal in the pit of my gut, and I feared so much for these poor, poor girls.
I don't want to say too much, but basically this book is set in a small town in the 1980s. Lizzie is friends with two sisters, Evie and Dusty, but Evie is her best friend. Dusty, the older sister, fills Lizzie with awe, because she's older and beautiful and in a way, aspirational. But Evie is her ride or die, and she spends as much time at the Verver household that she does at her own.
Then one day, Evie goes missing and everyone suspects it was an older man. A pervert with a taste for young girls. Lizzie decides to look into her best friend's disappearance, but the closer she gets to the Verver family, the darker and more convoluted the evil truth becomes.
I'm a little shocked that the ratings for this book are so low. I have to figure it's either the writing style (fair) or because people didn't understand that all of these girls are unreliable narrators. I see the same problem in books like LOLITA or MY DARK VANESSA, where if you don't have media literacy and take everything those narrators are saying at face value, you could read those books and think that they're actually defending the abuse of children. But that is REALLY not the case here. I feel like THE END OF EVERYTHING is a cautionary tale more than anything: not against girls needing to be more careful because fuck victim blaming, but about the desperate need for society to protect girls who, in their innocence, might conflate abuse with love.
God, this was heartbreaking. I feel like I need a hug. That ending. Woof.
Someone told me this was the "softest" of R. Lee Smith's books and it's a good thing I can't remember who that person was, because I would give them such a talking-to. COTTONWOOD is a brutal book. A lot of Smith's books are, but COTTONWOOD is particularly insidious because it sneaks up on you. With books like THE LAST HOUR OF GANN and SCHOLOMANCE, you already know things are going to be bad. Those books plunge you into darkness and mockingly toss you a flashlight. Not COTTONWOOD. The heroine, Sarah, is so hopeful, so excited to work for an international organization that houses the aliens that came to her planet. She sings and hums like a Disney princess. She basically is a Disney princess. So tell me, what kind of horror do you think a Disney princess would feel if she walked into what she imagined would be a very grand adventure... only to find out that it's basically a concentration camp?
Yeah. That.
***SPOILERS & TRIGGER WARNINGS***
Lots of people have compared this to District 9 and I can see that. The author even addresses it in an author's note in the book (apparently she came up with the idea before the movie and then was loath to publish it because of the similarities to the movie). It's similar but also different. COTTONWOOD is a romance. It's a very dark romance, but it is a romance. It's also an allegory for, yes, concentration camps and the cruelty of N*zi scientists, and it's also a look into the differences between performative and true acts of justice. Sarah wants to help, but her ability to actually help changes and grows as she does. By the end of the book, she's a different person. She hasn't lost any of her goodness, but she's gained the ability to stand up for herself and not be so naive.
Parts of this book were beautiful. Sanford/Nk’os’a’knko was a darling. His son, T'aki was so cute. And Sarah is such a likable heroine. Even when she's being a doof. But this book is DARK. Much darker than I signed up for and if I had known how dark it was going to be, I probably wouldn't have signed up to read it at the moment because that's not really what I've been wanting to read. But like I said, COTTONWOOD sneaks up on you. I just read GANN and could handle it. I thought it would be more of the same. But this book did things that GANN didn't that I found really difficult to read. There is a lot of medical gore and medical torture that is described in pretty harsh detail. The dog dies. People close to the heroine die. Aliens are tortured (including children). Sexual abuse is described, including those of underage people. There's a rank callousness here that is hard to deny when we continually see headlines outlining more heinous crimes; R. Lee Smith sees humanity at its best and worst.
I liked this book a lot and think R. Lee Smith is a genius. But man, this book was miserable to read. I also felt the ending dragged. The "epilogue" portion was interesting but made the book feel rushed, and a couple of things happened that felt too neat. But by this point, I was so desperate for a happy ending that I didn't care. JUST GIVE ME MY HEA SO I CAN GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE. ...more
This was a buddy-read with Heather. I finally finished it even though this book is way darker than I'm usually comfortable with, and I've been in a slump when it comes to dark reads. But I needed the Kindle Unlimited spot so I decided to suck it up buttercup and grin and bear it, because after getting traumatized by R. Lee Smith's COTTONWOOD, I felt like I could take on the world. FYI, this review is going to have some spoilers and discussions of some of the trigger warnings, so maybe don't read this if you don't want to read that kind of stuff.
THEN, EARTH SWALLOWED OCEAN is kind of like if someone took ADDIE LARUE and made it into an omegaverse novel, right down to the deals with the devil and the freckle worship. Sadie (her name even sounds like Addie lol) has something terrible happen to her in the beginning of the book, which should have resulted in her death, but the devil intervenes. Now if she can find an evil soul to replace her own, she can live. WHAT A DEAL.
Enter the werewolf brothers, Wright and Ridge Lindal. Wright served in WWII and is still traumatized from that and the death of his human wife (at his brother's hands no less). Ridge, on the other hand, lives his life according to a code of feral sociopathy. He almost eats-- literally-- Sadie after raping her, but then it turns out that she's his soulmate instead. Even though he's evil.
Throughout the whole book, the reader wonders which-- if either-- of the two brothers is going to die to fulfill the devil's prophecy. Which actually leads me to what is perhaps the biggest plothole in the whole book: WHY THE HELL didn't they take one of those religious serial killers down to the ocean and kill one of them? They were evil AF. But was this ever considered? Noooo lol. They were too busy having blasphemy-sex on top of the church altar (which, hey, you do you, boo, I'm not religious).
The writing is absolutely gorgeous but there's a point where literary repetition starts to feel more like accidental repetition and the author overused a lot of words, like lush, plush, and feral. Sometimes they would be used multiple times per page. She has a truly amazing writing style that is brilliantly evocative and reminded me of both Poppy Z. Brite and Tanith Lee at times, but this felt egregious.
I don't want to spoil the ending but there are triggers for cannibalism, gore, sex with blood, knotting, sex in a church, blasphemous stuff, child abuse (neglect), gun violence, references to Nazis, war violence, and suicidal ideation. Also, there's a TON of sex. I'm not usually one to call that a trigger but this is more erotica than it is a romance and that's the type of thing you have to be in the mood for. I skimmed a lot of chapters because the sex scenes started to feel so repetitive and were absolutely drenched in fluids (which I personally find gross, but some people like the sloppy stuff I guess). Maybe the point of this was to make it feel like they were animals, but it lacked tenderness and emotional intimacy. I think that's the problem with fated mates as a whole: it acts as a shortcut that omits the need for romantic development and trust.
Anyway, Shiloh Sloane is an author to watch. I've read two of her books now and both of them were amazing. I'm excited for the upcoming book set in this world called CRACKED BLUE SKY.
I really hate the blurb on the cover calling this an "antidote to chick lit," even though when I read this book as a teenager for the first time, I probably would have agreed with the sentiment. LIKE THE RED PANDA is a desperately unhappy book, featuring a desperately unhappy protagonist. Stella lost both her parents when they died of drug overdose (they were cocaine addicts). Despite her adversity, she lives with her foster parents in Irvine and is Princeton-bound. But then one day, something in her brain shifts. She gets the idea that nothing really matters. She cuts off her friends and family, she stops attending classes or taking care of herself; she is planning to end her life.
LIKE THE RED PANDA is a difficult book to read because when I had really bad depression as a teen, I related pretty strongly to the heroine. I think the author does a good job showing how depression kind of transcends sadness. There's a gnawing emptiness to depression, that nothing can really fill. The more you try to pour in, the worse you feel. The heroine has really dissociated from her life and the way she disconnects from herself and everything is painful to read because it's so well done.
As an adult who has my depression managed, I liked this book less. Mostly, because it made me feel so sad for the heroine, and how all the adult figures in her life failed her. LIKE THE RED PANDA doesn't romanticize suicide-- the heroine's grandfather, Donald, also seems to have depression and is also trying to end his life in his retirement home, and as the heroine struggles with her own decision she refuses her grandfather's attempts to enlist her in his own-- but it kind of feels like a cautionary tale. Privilege doesn't protect you from depression, and adult figures who are supposed to be guardians for the kids they manage can sometimes be so wrapped up in their own securities that they never really move on from their own internalized adolescence. It's a bleak, sad book with a miserable ending. I don't think it's an "antidote" to anything, except maybe that feeling of loneliness and isolation.
Okay, wow. I think this is one of the most messed up books I ever read. THE DARKEST CHILD was published in 2005 originally, and seems to be written in the vein of the melancholy coming of age stories that were popular at the time, like WHITE OLEANDER or DIVINE SECRETS OF THE YA-YA SISTERHOOD. However, this, I think I can safely say, is one of the most disturbing books I've ever read, and in terms of content, it's way worse than either of those things.
THE DARKEST CHILD is set in rural Georgia in the 1950s. The heroine is Tangy Mae, one of many illegitimate children belonging to Rozelle Quinn, a light-skinned Black woman who moonlights as a prostitute and sends out her children to earn her money and work for her affection. She is incredibly abusive and some of the things she does involve stabbing one of her children through the hand with an ice pick and branding another, the heroine, on the ankle with a red-hot iron.
Set against the backdrop of all this abuse is the burgeoning civil rights era. Some of the Black people in town are getting sick of being treated terribly and sometimes not even getting paid for their hard work. Segregation is in full-force but the people who get to decide to cross those lines-- and when-- are the white people, and that's made painfully clear when Tangy is forced to work for her mom in a brothel and is exploited by white men with twisted agendas.
I think this is a compelling story. I had a hard time putting it down. But it's not a story I enjoyed. The comparison to WHITE OLEANDER is pretty on point, but it goes to places that WHITE OLEANDER feared to tread. I don't have a lot of triggers, but descriptive gore and sexual exploitation of children are two subjects I have a hard time reading about, and both of those things were in abundance here.
This book is the perfect example of why the oversaturation of the illustrated cover trend has gotten some people so frustrated. If you didn't read the summary for this book, you might assume that you had gotten your hands on a chick-lit or a contemporary romance, and NOTHING-- I repeat, NOTHING-- could be father from the truth.
SOMEDAY, MAYBE is the story of Eve, a woman who has just found out that her husband unalived himself. In fact, she was the one who discovered the body. She handles her loss very poorly, falling into a depression that alienates her from her large and loving family, self-medicating with alcohol and substances, and dialing it in at a job that she never really loved. The plunge into this deep and profound grief is like a bleak and all-consuming ocean, and it shows how everything can end up being a trigger for someone who has spent many years of their life with someone who is suddenly and cruelly torn away.
The writing is great and I think the portrait of Eve and her family is done really well. Her mother in law, Aspen, is also truly awful. I kept waiting for a punch to the face that never came. There is a certain dark wit to the writing but it's not a humorous book. If anything, this is a book that shows how grief makes some people turn ugly and feral, kind of how CRYING IN H MART did. That book was also marketed as being funny by some people, and was also depressing as all get out. I don't know what it is with people marketing grief memoirs and grief books as "funny" but it says something disturbing about how people consume stories about women's pain, don't you think?
SOMEDAY, MAYBE is not a book I'd read again and I think you should go into this very carefully, especially if you have experienced a recent loss or are feeling very depressed yourself. But it's a very human and honest book and I'm not sorry I read it. Nwabineli is clearly an author to watch and I can't wait to read more from her.
I'm honestly kind of shocked that this was in the cruise ship library because it was as depressing as all get out and actually left me in a little bit of a funk. I have a hard time envisioning this as someone's beach read, you know? But that said, it was still an amazingly good read. The comparisons to SPEAK are on point, although I think it's a more mature work in some ways because of how morally ambiguous Eden is. It takes a lot of skill to make an unlikable heroine so sympathetic, and even though Eden does demonstrate a lot of toxic behaviors and can be quite cruel, you can definitely see where she's coming from.
When Eden was just fourteen, she was raped by her older brother's friend. He sneaked into her bed and told her he'd kill her if she told. After that, she's never quite the same. She can't tell anyone what happened, so she ends up internalizing it and trying to grab control wherever she can. She quits band, she starts acting like a control freak in her book club, and she starts changing her appearance. Then she starts hooking up with guys, becoming quite promiscuous. Almost like she's trying to play out what happened, but with full control.
The book is carved into four parts: freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior year. In these sections, Eden makes new friends and loses them, and complicates all of her relationships with her trauma. Because she never tells anyone what happened to her, people don't know why she's acting the way she does, and sometimes the effects are heartbreaking. I honestly had a tightness in my chest when I finished because I was so worried about the outcome, but it ended up being kind of bittersweet. That's why I think this is a book for older teens as opposed to younger ones: the heroine isn't as likable as heroines of other rape-focused books, like JUST LISTEN or SPEAK, and the morality isn't quite as clear-cut, nor is the ending quite as satisfying.
That said, I think books like these are very important because there really is no right way to be a victim, and even if you wear revealing clothes or sleep around, rape is still rape. Painting people as "ideal victims" contributes to rape culture and makes it easier to write off testimony. So I'm really glad that books like this exist, which explore what trauma looks like in more muddied waters. Bless the morbid and gloomy person who brought this book onto the cruise ship so that I could read it, too.
After reading and loving ALL HER LITTLE SECRETS, I knew I had to get my hands on anything else this author wrote. ALL HER SECRETS was a lot like an airport thriller: addictive and fast-paced. ANYWHERE YOU RUN is paced more like one of those domestic thrillers where a woman with lots of skeletons in her closet is on the run from her past. Set in the 1960s, it's about two Black women who have plenty to hide. One is a murderess, the other is on the cusp of social shame. Both end up running, but there are plenty of people chasing them down.
I don't want to say too much but I loved how this book overlaps with ALL HER LITTLE SECRETS (it's also set in Chillicothe). Violet and Marigold are both incredibly strong women, with very different problems. I liked how Violet would do whatever was necessary for survival and I thought it was interesting how her prettiness bought her so much trouble and bad attention, and made her second-guess what people wanted her for. Marigold, on the other hand, was intelligent but insecure, and her naivete could cause her to get betrayed. It was so satisfying seeing them grow and gain confidence over the course of the story, which was tightly plotted and connected in various interesting ways. Can I write like this when I grow up? is what I kept thinking, as I read.
The author had a note in the beginning of the book talking about how she uses language that fits the times, and the people who used it, even if she doesn't endorse it personally. I respect that because I think it's important to portray history as it really was. In ANYWHERE YOU RUN, you see people working hard to advance civil rights, and you also see the people who are determined to forestall that at any costs. In the beginning of the book, three civil rights activists (two white people, one Black person) are murdered at the hands of racist Missourians who want to keep the status quo. This sets the tone for a book that shows the reality of segregation and large-scale, openly endorsed infrastructural racism.
I would have given this five stars, but I felt like the writing could be very repetitive at times and the ending felt just a little unsatisfying in one very notable regard. (No spoilers, though!) That said, I finished this in less than twenty-four hours and I'm pretty sure that Wanda M. Morris is now officially an autobuy author for me. I just hope I'll be able to get a new fix soon.
So apparently I'm just giving five star reviews to every thriller I read now, but that's okay, because every thriller I read now has been unusually awesome. Case in point: THE HEIGHTS. I'm actually shocked that it has such low ratings because it's such a good story. It manages to capture the bleak passions and the emotional insanity of the original WUTHERING HEIGHTS story while also modernizing it. It's been about ten years since I've read WH so I looked up the summary, and THE HEIGHTS follows it really well, with a couple tweaks to ensure that it ends up being period-appropriate and working for the story.
THE HEIGHTS, like its predecessor, is dual timeline. The modern-day one has DCI Lockwood looking into the numerous deaths surrounding a coal-mining town, specifically a place called The Heights, where the Earnshaws used to live. Maybe I'm twisted for finding this amusing, but it makes sense-- why wouldn't a police want to look into a place where a horrendous amount of people mysteriously died? DID YOU EVEN READ THE ORIGINAL WUTHERING HEIGHTS? Emily Bronte was aiming to be the 19th century George R. R. Martin.
The past timeline starts out with Catherine and her other brother, Mick, as children. Heathcliff is brought on as a foundling, like the original, but here it's implied that he's one of Catherine's father's by-blows. The story is set against the background of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's decision to close twenty coal mines, which led to a miners' strike in 1984. This gives the story a bleak and gloomy setting, except instead of the moors, it's working class poverty and hopeless and coalface and unsafe mines and riots that set the gothic backdrop. Cathy and Heathcliff avoid their family by running off together, always together, until they meet the Linton children: the wealthy offspring of the people who owned and helped close the mine.
I don't want to say too much because less is more going in, but I think you can read this as a standalone book separate from it standing alone as a WH retelling. Heathcliff is seriously crazy. Juliet Bell (brilliant penname by the way; if you know, you know) captures how selfish Cathy was and how aggressive and irrational Heathcliff was. I mean, he murders a puppy. (Spoiler.) I loved the romance between Cathy and Heathcliff, even though I recognized how destructive and unhealthy it was, and everyone around them just ended up caught in their chaotic maelstrom. It was brilliant.
And now I'm sad and more than a little devastated.
I would recommend this book to people who read and enjoyed MY DARK VANESSA, although TAMING THE BEAST is much sadder, much more desolate; it's honestly one of the saddest books I've read in a while. Despite the beautiful writing, it is a horrific story of a man who takes advantage of his fourteen-year-old student and this breaks her, although she thinks it's love, and she spends the rest of her teen years and her early adulthood going after man after man, trying to chase the high she thinks she got from her first time.
Sarah is probably one of the most compellingly flawed female characters I've read about recently. Her love of books is an ode to reading itself, but her view of herself is like a warped mirror. She doesn't see the beautiful girl other people want to save; instead she sees the victim two cruel men made of her when she was a teen, the piece of trash her family discarded her as, and the mirage that her best friend and would-be lover Jamie sees her as: the good girl she can never be, not anymore.
I can see why this book has such low ratings. The ending is sad. The message is sad. Daniel is awful. Mike is awful. Jamie is tragic. Sarah is broken. It's a book about how some events just leave their irreparable mark on you, and sometimes that mark singles you out for destruction. TAMING THE BEAST seems to suggest that there is a point at which some people can no longer be saved, or no longer want to be saved, and there were several points-- especially in parts two and three-- that just made me want to weep. My heart actually hurt when I set this down, and the ending was like being punched in the stomach. Despite that, the writing is exceptionally beautiful. Sometimes I'm jealous because an author wrote a story that I wish I'd written; but this time, I'm jealous, because Maguire wrote a story that I never could.
I keep telling myself that I need to read more indie authors but then I never do. I'm always afraid that I won't like the book-- and even though that's a risk with any book being published, I feel worse giving a bad review to a book that was written by someone who doesn't have a major publishing house to back their PR. And I'm not going to lie. But one of my friends recommended MANSIONS to me on my Instagram and told me that it was a gothic romance, which is basically my love language, and when I looked into it further, it looked like it was also going to be toxic and intense, which sounded super fun. Especially since I've been on a lil' gothic romance kick lately.
MANSIONS starts out intense and then gets really, really dark. Unlike a lot of dark romances, it doesn't do this by gratuitous gore or other shock tactics. Most of the darkness comes from the toxic relationship, and the hero and heroine going down some very dark spirals. The hero, Dorian, is a sociopath and also a sadist, and the heroine, Adrienne, is a masochist with severe emotional issues. Childhood trauma has made her quick to run at the first sign of trouble, and she works as a photographer in war zones for the adrenaline kick, as well as to make a difference. When Dorian aggressively hits on her at a gala and demands that she come to his hotel to hookup, she's terrified by how much she wants him and immediately flees. But then something terrible happens, and when Adrienne comes back to the United States, she's been severely maimed.
From here, the book just gets even more toxic. The heroine is suffering severe depression and PTSD. The hero is manipulative and awful, but what keeps him from being totally unlikable is his scary devotion to the heroine. It's so fanatical, it's almost religious. He's been obsessed with her since an encounter from when they were children, and since then she's kind of become the One Thing He Could Never Have. And even though she's really vulnerable, she keeps coming up with ways to thwart him. So even though she kind of isn't exactly the flawless vase he thought he put on the pedestal, he kind of ends up liking her more for all of those cracks. At one point, he even says that he's not in love with his fantasy ideal of her, but who she actually is when she's in front of him, and I really liked that.
Some things that will probably upset readers: both characters are legitimately, melodramatically crazy in a way that you really don't see anymore outside of a gothic throwback or a soap opera. There is medical gore (light) from the heroine's accident. There is drug use. The hero has a mistress and a wife who he is sort of seeing in addition to Adrienne, but most of his interactions with them are off-page and it's clear that she is the favored one in this scenario. There are references to suicide and suicidal ideation, on and off-page. At a couple points, it got so heavy that I stepped back to work on a puzzle and think about the book to prepare myself mentally before continuing further.
At some points, this came very close to being a five-star read for me, but it had a ton of typos and it also felt a little too short. The story is fully realized, which is utterly impressive given the length, but I wished there were more scenes between the two of them when they were young and then over the years before they met up again as adults. I think it would have made this book even more emotionally devastating. Still, I think MANSIONS will stick with me for a while. What a gloomy, intense read. Eat your hearts out, Catherine and Heathcliff, lol.
Who asked for the Deliverance/American Psycho mashup? Not me, but boy am I going to read that anyway. BROTHER is honestly one of the most disturbing books I've ever read. I normally hate horror novels but the kind that suckers me into traumatizing myself every time is the intimate, character portrait sort of horror novel, which is how I ended up being scarred for life by books like Misery. Once I get invested, I can't put the book down, no matter how much I want to.
Less is definitely more when it comes to BROTHER, but it definitely has TWs for basically everything under the sun. This is one of those books that not only shows people at their worst, but also kind of how they got that way. The two stars of this book are Michael, a not-so-ordinary teenage boy who hates his family (for a good reason). And Ray/Rebel, Michael's adoptive brother who is filled with a driving need for vengeance, poisoned by a hate that will literally stop at nothing.
The claustrophobic setting, high emotional stakes, and you-could-cut-it-with-a-knife level tension made this a gripping book, a real white-knuckler for sure, but I will also never read this again because it's so dark and so depressing. It's the sort of book that just kind of leaves you feeling dead inside. Brilliant story, brilliant writing, and daring author. I'll read more from her but it won't be this.
WHEN THE RECKONING COMES is so good, I'm honestly surprised that it doesn't have way more reviews. It's kind of like a cross between Octavia Butler's Kindred and Stephen King's Rose Red, in that it's a haunted house story, but also a scathing criticism on the cruelty of slavery, and the way that future generations pave over the past, reimagining it as a picturesque idyll instead of what it really was.
Mira grew up with childhood friends, Jesse and Celine, but then they grew apart and she moves away. When Celine gets married, she phones up Mira and asks her to come to her wedding, which is being held at a recently restored plantation house. Mira is obviously like, what the heck, Celine, are you crazy, and initially refuses, but a phone call from Jesse changes her mind. Jesse, her childhood crush, who grew distant from her as well after one night in a haunted house went so, so wrong... So she decides to go to make things right.
Parts of this book are incredibly disturbing. I have a pretty high bar for disturbing content. This book flung from that bar and did somersaults over it. At the dark core of the Woodsman House is a gruesome history of some of the worst crimes against humanity, which are gradually revealed in pretty horrifying ways. I'm not particularly superstitious but some of my favorite ghost stories revolve around the idea that places of extreme anger or tragedy or pain can become psychic vectors, where all of that bleak emotion seeks into the walls and the floors and turns the house into a place of living, breathing hate and vengeance. I feel like WHEN THE RECKONING COMES buys into that sort of haunted house story, and man, is the payoff good.
My only qualm is that I would have liked more romance between Jesse and Mira, since I really shipped them as a couple, and I felt like the "present" portions of the book weren't quite as compelling as the scenes about their childhood and the historical passages, apart from the scene when Mira comes to the plantation and sees the Disney take on plantation life. It's physically sickening and I thought the author did such a good job with how understated it was, letting it all speak for itself.
This is a horror story, a ghost story, a coming of age story, and a lesson on the importance of social justice, all wrapped up in a bleak and oddly compelling parcel. I'd recommend it to anyone who has the stomach for it, which unfortunately won't be everyone. Read at your own risk.
I honestly believe that middle grade is one of the hardest groups to write for successfully because your target audience consists of kids who are fresh out of elementary and/or just about to enter high school, and they want to feel grown up about the books they read, so you, as an author, have to deliver on serious subjects and solid characterization while also not traumatizing the kiddos. I think I'd have a lot of trouble doing that, so I really admire the middle grade authors who deliver on the serious factor for their child audiences.
GHOST BOYS is one of those books. It is an incredibly tragic, very dark book for a middle grade audience that deals with a young boy's death from a police shooting. Jerome was playing with a toy gun his friend gave him and a cop thought it was a real one and shot him. Now a ghost, Jerome ends up witnessing the aftermath of his death, watching his family grieve him, his killer stand trial, and his killer's daughter feel very conflicted about reconciling the father she loves with the man who has done something absolutely unforgivable.
Also in this afterlife is the ghost of Emmett Till, who was also the victim of racial discrimination (albeit of a different kind and flavor). Jerome doesn't know who he is at first, so his identity and history are something of a mystery to Jerome (and by proxy, the audience), until he tells his sad story. I knew about Emmett Till, and his story IS horrifying, but I felt like the author did a good job holding back on the details while still conveying the horror of his death. Violence in YA is always hard to read about but here, it has a purpose: to illustrate the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement and to show that we are not the post-racial society some might like to imagine we are until we fix the racism that is embedded deeply into the social and infrastructural strands of the U.S.'s tapestry of discrimination.
I cried several times while reading this book. Jerome is a compelling narrator and so is Emmett. I felt so bad for his family. The only thing I really took issue with is the fact that part of Jerome's unfinished business is teaching the policeman's daughter How Not to Be Racist, which kind of makes me feel like this is more of a book about Black people for white people. The ending is not a happy one and might be hard for some kids to read, but I think the idea of the murdered Black people as ghosts also serves as a metaphor for all those silent spaces that should be filled with Black lives that were ended prematurely. It ends up kind of feeling like a cross between BEFORE I FALL and THE HATE U GIVE. I personally feel like both those books did what they did better, but this was still a pretty gut-wrenching novel.
I'd recommend this to the dark academia girlies who are fans of Donna Tartt's SECRET HISTORY and Kate Moretti's THE SPIRES, as it kind of reads like a YA version of that. Set in an English boarding school, this is about Adamma, a Nigerian student, and her close and somewhat toxic friendship with the school golden girl, Scarlett. It's told in dual timeline, starting from Adamma's first day at school and ending after their friendship does... and something terrible happens.
I don't want to say too much about this book because less is more going in (I feel like I say this a lot??) but it's so full of surprises. Tonally, it's quite dark for a YA and deals with a lot of unsavory and mature topics. I actually like it when I find YA that is clearly meant to appeal to the college-age and/or college-bound youths, because I think there should be books for every maturity level of teens. Byrne always knew when to pull back and not provide too much detail, but this is definitely sensual and terrifying by turns, and often left me feeling desolate and hollow.
Loved the Nigerian protagonist and the little snippets of her culture. I also think that this author did the best job depicting the intimate push-pull relationship of vicious teen girl relationships in a way that puts her on par with Megan Abbott (who's famously good at it). The ending made me gasp, and was appropriately gutting. I feel like maybe part of the reason this book doesn't have more of a following is because it's ridiculously slow burn for a thriller. The character portraits are just as important if not more so than who did the bad things. That said, I'm absolutely obsessed. Do I wish the ending was happier and the pacing had been a little neater? Yes. But I'm still gonna read everything she writes.
The first time I read this book was as an ARC when it first came out and I couldn't stop thinking about it. THE SUMMER PRINCE was one of the first diverse sci-fi-fantasy books I ever read and it totally blew me away. It's set in a dystopian matriarchal society in a futuristic Brazil, where all of the leaders are women and everyone old expects to live to two hundred. They elect their kings in an elaborate, Hunger Games-like ceremony every five years, and the king, in turn, chooses his new queen one year later: on the day of his sacrificial execution.
Our heroine, June, is an activist/artist, kind of like a female Banksy. She does all of these elaborate art pranks and one of these is at the very beginning, with her friend Gil, to help elect the underdog choice: a boy from the very worst parts of Palmares Tres named Enki. The prank works and the three of them end up first as glamorous poster children for the opulent party scene, and then as icons of rebellion. As the year goes on, the three of them become incredibly close: Gil and Enki become lovers and June starts to fall for him too, all the while, his fate hangs over the three of them like the sword of Damocles.
I think I loved this book just as much the second time. I loved the way Brazilian culture and the Portuguese language are woven into the story. I liked the heroine's passion for art, and how it ends up taking a more political bent as she sees more of the injustice that's inherent in the system that she's been blind to because of her privilege. I liked how there wasn't really a lot of slut-shaming, and how all of the characters in this book felt like real people making real decisions in this fantastic backdrop. It takes a while to get into, but I think the heroine sells the world-building, and her melancholy and wistfulness end up making this a pretty devastating read, especially as the story winds to the end.
I was a bit torn on whether to give this a four or a five. It's not a perfect book, but it's still a very, very good one, so I've decided to round up because I've never read anything like it before and I still love it.
This book is so emotionally intense. You know a book is good when you find yourself thinking about the characters all day, with that sinking feeling of dread in your gut at the thought of anything bad happening to them. I'm honestly so impressed at how deftly the author handled such a controversial and weighty subject, because abuse can be such a hard topic to get right. This story is about Sam, a missing teen who was abducted by a child predator and held captive for three years. The story is narrated by Josh, Sam's childhood friend who was the last to see him on the day he went missing, and Beth, Sam's older sister. Both of them have to adjust when Sam abruptly turns up again, three years later.
I actually like the decision not to have Sam be the narrator because I think it would have been way too dark. The little teases we get of what Sam's life was like with Rusty really turned my stomach and actually made me feel really anxious, so I'm glad we were one-step removed from that narrative. Especially since I actually really liked Josh and Beth, who both have problems of their own. Both of them are struggling with survivor's guilt-- especially Josh-- and Josh is attempting to come to terms with his sexuality while Beth is trying to find her identity as something separate from her brother's. Both of them experience so much anxiety and trauma and become fixated on what happened to Sam, and their own involvement in it, which I thought was tragic and real.
The story is quite sad and potentially triggering, obviously. I thought it was handled really well and liked that the author didn't go into details about the abuse, because it still hit... really, really hard. I think my heart broke about a hundred times for all three characters. I liked how they were allowed to be flawed, all in their own way, and that everything was so complex and nuanced. There was just one scene I really didn't like-- a scene where Sam does something sexual with Josh. It felt like a good opportunity to delve into consent and cyclical abuse, but nothing ever really came of it. I was kind of disappointed about that, especially since the blurb makes it sound like there's going to be a romance between Sam and Josh (there isn't). I really didn't like that scene and there were a couple scenes after that I also didn't like that ultimately made me deduct a star, because I felt like they took away from the message of the book.
Overall, though, WE NOW RETURN TO REGULAR LIFE is a really dark, emotionally involved read that will appeal to anyone who likes more mature YA books that dive into tough subjects. I'm definitely going to be keeping an eye out for more books by this author, especially if they are as dark as this.
Oh my God, this was so good. So the premise of this book is basically "Bad Girl gets sent to Bad Kid School for stabbing her douchebag ex in the hand with a pencil for calling her younger brother the R-word. Finds love-- and herself." Which sounds cheesy as fuck, but it was really, really, really well done.
Really!
With books I really love, I almost can't be bothered to write a normal review because I just want to scream incomprehensibly in numbers and letters, so I usually do a bullet list so I can squeal over all of my favorite things.
We're sorry, but the number you are trying to dial, 1-800-MY-FEELINGS, has been disconnected. Please try again later when the caller isn't a hot weeping mess on the floor.
Hi, this book fucking wrecked me. I'm not even sorry because it hurt so good. The original Peter Pan story is actually very dark and creepy; it is a world filled with cruelty and death. The Disney version only really scrapes at the surface of it. Jodi Lynn Anderson's interpretation is a marvelous, twisty world-- a version of Neverland that is fickle and capricious, as subject to whims as its inhabitants.
Here, the narrator is Tinker Bell, but the main character is really Tiger Lily. She is given full agency in this book. We see her troubles and woes. Her village is suspicious of her and thinks she is cursed, but because she is the daughter of the shaman (who I think is supposed to be a two-spirit person), she is granted some clemency. All of that is changed when she meets Peter and his band of lost boys and the English people come to their shores.
This was just so dark and so good. Mermaids eat people. The pirates are psychotic (one of them used to be and still is a serial killer). Peter's lost boys were actually boys he rescued/kidnapped that were swabs/slaves of the pirates. Wendy is-- well, a bitch, although she doesn't mean to be, which makes it even more annoying that she is. And Tiger Lily is... wonderful. I loved how fleshed out she was, with strengths and weaknesses. There's an air of doomed romance that hangs over the plot, keeping it tight, making you turn the pages with bated breath. I love doomed romance even though I hate it for being doomed and if a book makes you invested enough that the ending hurts, it must be a good book.
So yes, I read TIGER LILY fully expecting not to like it and it ended up destroying me.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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