Nothing to See Here is a cute, funny book with a highly improbable premise involving two children that catch on fire when they get agitated. It had me laughing out loud, which does not happen every often when I read. It is an easy novel to read and perfect if you are looking for a bit of levity after some heavy reading.
…
I was a little worried that this one would end up being a dud, but I am pleased to report that The Book Eaters is a good novel. I think bibliophiles like me will really like this one. It is a bit on the nose with respect to its themes, but it’s characters and world-building are interesting enough to make you overlook the obviousness of the novel.
…
The Last House on Needless Street appears to have been marketed as a horror novel, but I would not call it a horror novel. It isn’t even scary, which I found disappointing; however, it is a very fascinating psychological thriller which I read through very quickly because I HAD TO KNOW HOW IT WOULD END.
…
The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs is the sequel to Katherine Howe’s first novel, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, which I will admit I did not realize until I started reading it. I read Deliverance Dane over ten years ago, so I kind of wish I had re-read it before reading Temperance Hobbs, but there were enough details in Temperance Hobbs to remind me of what happened in Deliverance Dane. The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs is an okay book. It is not as interesting as The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and I think I prefer Brunonia Barry’s Salem-set novels over Katherine Howe’s (as a side note, I have also read Howe’s The House of Velvet and Glass, which was an interesting novel, but it depressed the hell out of me and so I donated it because I never want to read it again).
…I just went on a ten-day vacation to New York City, Boston/Salem and Montreal, and I managed to read FOUR books during my vacation (I spent a lot of time on planes and a train):
If you were to reduce its plot to the simplest of terms, then White Ivy is not a very original novel. It is a story about a poor and unremarkable person who wants to belong to the wealthy and important crowd. It is a story that has been told repeatedly. White Ivy has been compared to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, which I did not like. There are certainly parallels between the two novels, especially the fate of one of the characters in White Ivy which mirrors that of Bunny in The Secret History, but I like White Ivy because it tells its story from the perspective of a Chinese American protagonist, a complicated woman who you can empathize with (up to a certain point), and it is as much about the immigrant experience in America as it is about a social climber.
…
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.
…
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.
…
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.
…
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.
…