Set almost entirely within a maternity ward at an Irish hospital during the 1918 influenza pandemic, The Pull of the Stars is an engrossing and rich reading experience, and I feel as though I have come out of the experience of reading it like the novel’s narrator, Nurse Julia Powers, with a deeper understanding of how the world operates.
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The Death of Jane Lawrence is one of those books that sounds like it should be good, but then it turns out not to be. Very disappointing, as I love me a gothic novel. The Death of Jane Lawrence definitely is gothic, and there were definitely creepy moments that I read through very quickly because I did not want to scare myself before going to be bed, but in the end, The Death of Jane Lawrence gets bogged down in the science of magic, and I am not entirely sure what I was that I just read.
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My Year of Rest and Relaxation is one of the more bizarre novels I have ever read, but I liked it and found it to be darkly funny and compulsively readable.
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The Midnight Library is one of those books that I keep noticing shows up in listicles of recommended books on Buzzfeed. I was kind of reluctant to read it because I find that heavily hyped books usually do not turn out to be as good as I hope. The Midnight Library is a novel that teaches its reader to appreciate the life that they have and to learn to see the good in it. It is a pleasant reading experience, for the most part, but I did not find it to be revelatory and it did not offer up anything that I do not already know.
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I watched Lovecraft Country the TV show on HBO back in 2020 and thought it was pretty good. It is too bad the TV show was cancelled before it got a second season. I have had Lovecraft Country the novel on which the TV show is based sitting in my TBR pile for a long time and finally got around to reading it. It is too bad I took so long to read it because I really enjoyed the novel and was disappointed that it had to end. As is usually the case, I thought the novel was better than the TV show.
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Cold Cold Bones is an improvement over last year’s The Bone Code with its disappointing vaccine tampering plotline. I read the Temperance Brennan novels because I have become invested in the character and her relationships with Canadian hunky private detective Andrew Ryan, surly North Carolina detective Skinny Slidell and her daughter, Katy, who in this novel has recently been honourably discharged from the army and may be suffering from PTSD, which is causing issues between her and Tempe. But I am beginning to feel that as Kathy Reichs keeps churning out these novels, she is sacrificing Tempe’s intelligence for the sake of plot. Tempe’s behaviour is becoming more and more frustrating as she continues to defy police orders, and just plain common sense, and puts herself in unnecessary danger while acting like she is an action hero instead of a forensic anthropologist.
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My feelings towards The Confessions of Frannie Langton are ambivalent. I do not hate it, but I do not love it either. It was just… okay. If you like historical fiction, you may enjoy The Confessions of Frannie Langton, but I do not think you are missing out if you never read it. The novel is about a Black woman (a former slave) accused of murder, but the slavery aspect of the novel becomes a subplot to the primary narrative of a forbidden relationship between a mistress and her maid. I found The Confessions of Frannie Langton to be a bit boring in the middle, which is too bad because I was interested in reading about a former slave’s life in England during a time when slavery was recently abolished, and slaves were supposed to be considered free people in England.
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Homeland Elegies is an intriguing mix of autobiography and fiction. The protagonist is named after the author, Ayad Akhtar. The fictional Ayad is a writer and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a successful play called Disgraced, just like the real Ayad. The fictional Ayad’s father is a doctor, just like the real Ayad’s father. These little bits of fact will make you wonder, as you read the novel, how many other details are based on actual events that happened to the author. Ayad Akhtar does this on purpose as a commentary on the confusion between fact and fiction that we see today in social media and the news. What is truth? What is “fake news”? Are we discerning enough to not take things at face value? It is this blending of fact and fiction that initially attracted me to read Homeland Elegies, and I am very glad that I read it.
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Velvet Was the Night is the second novel written by Silvia Moreno-Garcia that I have read, the first being Mexican Gothic, which I reviewed in May. I like Mexican Gothic better, despite the strange turn it takes towards the end, because I prefer gothic over noir; however, I still found Velvet Was the Night to be an engrossing read.
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I highly recommend The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper. I started reading it with no expectations and was pleasantly surprised by how much I ended up enjoying it.
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