Hello, Tartlets and Darksiders! A new podcast episode is up on Dark Side of the Word. Join me and Kait as we discuss Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh.
The story is set around one woman in the midst of the (real life) 1951 unsolved mass poisoning of a French village. When we picked up the book, we thought we were in for dark historical fiction with some occult-y vibes -- but, boy, were we wrong. SO WRONG.
Listen as we try our best to piece...
J. Courtney Sullivan is one of my “auto-buy” authors (okay, “auto-borrow,” since I use the library), so the minute I heard about Friends and Strangers, I added it to my “must read list”. I've read all the books written by this author, but Friends and Strangers is my favorite since her debut novel, Commencement. Maybe because this new book contains threads of her first -- the college age storyline, the coming of age factor, and the...
Umm, could someone please explain A House at the Bottom of a Lake to me? Because I sure as hell don’t get it. Admittedly, that could just be me. This could be another Bunny situation going on, where I’m just not existential enough to understand what I just read. This novella by Josh Malerman (of well-deserved Bird Box fame) is a horror story…kinda. Two teenagers row out to some hidden lake where they go swimming and discover an actual...
Homegoing is one of those novels that I’ve borrowed from the library various times, only to return it, time and time again, unread. It’s been recommended to me by several people, but it wasn’t until my blogger friend Literary Dates posted about this powerful book that I actually cracked it open and began reading. This novel by Yaa Gyasi is everything people promised it would be. It's gripping, it's emotional. It's raw, it's honest. It's...
I can't believe I'm saying this, but Mexican Gothic is the latest bestseller to fall into the DNF pit. Let me start off this book review by saying that I'm not only disappointed by how much I didn't enjoy this Gothic suspense -- but I'm very surprised by it. Mexican Gothic made HUGE waves last year among bookstagrammers and book bloggers, for its book cover alone! Which is, admittedly, gorgeous. A creepy, crumbling Victorian mansion in a remote...
I uttered "What the fuck?" an unprecedented number of times while reading Bunny. That’s pretty much the only reaction you can have to this novel by Mona Awad. It's a complete What the actual eff??? ride from beginning to end. Bunny takes place at a prestigious art school. There’s a pack of hoity-toity, grad school women there who behave like middle schoolers; they roam around in a pack, affectionately calling each other “Bunny” like...
Another DNF. *sigh* This one pained me. To add yet another title to my Did Not Finish tally, and to have it be the third time I've had to do this in about a month. On the plus side, that TBR pile that looked so intimidating just a week ago is now looking pretty darn manageable. But, I mean...BARBARA KINGSOLVER. She's a legend who writes some damn fine novels. The Bean Trees was eye-opening for me when I read it the summer before high school....
