A Most Puzzling Murder is a murder mystery novel with puzzles that the reader solves alongside the protagonist for clues to figure out whodunnit. Now, I love mystery novels and puzzles, so I was expecting to love this novel as well, but this novel is not it.
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Nnedi Okorafor is a writer of sci-fi and fantasy novels for both adults and children. Death of the Author is the first novel of hers that I have read, and I would say it is more literary fiction than sci-fi even though it has much to say about technology and Artificial Intelligence. I wasn’t sure I was going to like Death of the Author because of the sci-fi elements to the story (sci-fi isn’t really my jam), but I ended up really enjoying this novel.
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What drew me to Isola is its basis in historical record of a sixteenth-century French noblewoman who survived being marooned on an uninhabited island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence for two years before she was rescued and returned to France. Like the author, I wondered how the heck this woman survived two Canadian winters mostly on her own in the sixteenth-century. Unfortunately, we will never know the true account of Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval’s survival, but I found Goodman’s fictional account of Marguerite’s story compelling.
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I really should examine the psychology behind why I, a childless cat mom, keep choosing to read mom-noir. I’ve read Zoje Stage’s Baby Teeth, Ashley Audrain’s The Push, and now Helena Echlin’s Clever Little Thing, all novels about mothers who think there is something disturbingly wrong with their daughters (it’s always the daughters). And I keep reading these books even though I know they are not going to be great, and Clever Little Thing is the worst of the three.
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I feel like I was misled into believing that The Berry Pickers is a mystery novel. It is a mystery, for the characters in the novel, but for the reader there is no mystery as to what happened to a four-year-old Indigenous child that goes missing. I feel some disappointment with this novel because I love a good mystery, but The Berry Pickers turned out to be an emotional story about family and trauma.
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