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”. What's Friends and Strangers about? Friends and Strangers is about the powerful but transitory nature of relationships, which has always fascinated me. I’m so intrigued by how people can go from being strangers to being friends to...
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. What's A House at the Bottom of a Lake about? This novella by Josh Malerman (of well-deserved Bird Box fame) is a horror story. Kind of. It's about two teenagers row out...
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. What I loved about Homegoing Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is everything people promised it would be. It's gripping, 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. Author Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic made HUGE waves last year among bookstagrammers and book bloggers, for its book cover alone! Which is, admittedly, gorgeous. ...
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. What's Bunny about? 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...
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....