Review: The Death of Mrs. Westaway

Title: The Death of Mrs. Westaway

Author: Ruth Ware

Genre: Thriller with Mystery vibes

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of parent, car accident, murder, poverty, threats of violence, grief, infidelity (mentions)

Back Cover:

On a day that begins like any other, Hal receives a mysterious letter bequeathing her a substantial inheritance. She realizes very quickly that the letter was sent to the wrong person—but also that the cold-reading skills she’s honed as a tarot card reader might help her claim the money.

Soon, Hal finds herself at the funeral of the deceased…where it dawns on her that there is something very, very wrong about this strange situation and the inheritance at the centre of it.

Review:

I did not have very high hopes for this book. It was another one from my Low Standards list, and while I was interested in the fortune-teller attempting to claim an inheritance that wasn’t hers, I’m not usually much for mystery/thriller books. I decided to give it a chance, but I did not have high expectations.

I very nearly DNF’d it pretty early in. Hal’s relentless, inescapable struggle with poverty was overwhelming, hard to read, and almost made me tap out just because it was so hard to read. But it also provided the foundation for why a generally honest twenty-something would pretend to be a long-lost granddaughter to scam her way into an inheritance that isn’t hers. I pushed through it, in part because I wanted to at least give it until my next break in case the actual scam part got interesting, and I’m so glad I did.

First off, I thought going in that Hal was going to be some kind of scammer. I suppose she technically was, but she wasn’t the cold-hearted grifter I’d expected – she was young, and scared, and alone, and doing this thing that she knows is wrong and is pretty sure is a mistake because she’s desperate and doesn’t know what else to do. I connected with her immediately and deeply wanted her to succeed.

The plot starts out with Hal just attempting to claim this inheritance, but it slides into more complicated territory very quickly. The Westaway family is full of secrets and nobody wants to share any of them with Hal. Even if Hal isn’t a long-lost granddaughter, her mother may have had some connection with this family in her mysterious past. And she’d better figure it out soon, because some of those secrets might turn deadly.

It’s fascinating and engaging. A tangle of family secrets in a very fucked-up family that slowly get discovered and a twist that I somewhat predicted but not from that character, set in a big, creepy, mostly-disused family mansion in a tiny British town. Even the family that Hal interacts with are interesting and varied as they wrangle with this new relative. I thought this story would be mostly about Hal’s moral dilemma, and there is some of that, but it’s also about family, family secrets, the ways the past haunts us, and a really good thriller as Hal tries to unravel secrets while protecting her own.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. I kept concocting theories about what had actually happened and how Hal and her mother were involved with these people, and though I got part of it, I was also way off on the crucial bits. It was twisty, layered, and a great reading experience. I’m so glad I pushed through the difficult beginning to finish it.

Review: The Lies of Locke Lamora

Title: The Lies of Locke Lamora

Series: Gentleman Bastard #1

Author: Scott Lynch

Genre: Low Fantasy/Heist Thriller

Trigger Warnings: Death, major character death, death of parent, child death, terminal illness (mentions), child abuse, blood (severe), gore, injury (severe), murder, excrement, violence, animal cruelty, sexual content (brief), torture

Back Cover:

An orphan’s life is harsh-and often short-in the island city of Camorr, built on the ruins of a mysterious alien race. But born with a quick wit and a gift for thieving, Locke Lamora has dodged both death and slavery, only to fall into the hands of an eyeless priest known as Chains-a man who is neither blind nor a priest.

A con artist of extraordinary talent, Chains passes his skills on to his carefully selected “family” of orphans-a group known as the Gentlemen Bastards. Under his tutelage, Locke grows to lead the Bastards, delightedly pulling off one outrageous confidence game after another. Soon he is infamous as the Thorn of Camorr, and no wealthy noble is safe from his sting.

Passing themselves off as petty thieves, the brilliant Locke and his tightly knit band of light-fingered brothers have fooled even the criminal underworld’s most feared ruler, Capa Barsavi. But there is someone in the shadows more powerful-and more ambitious-than Locke has yet imagined. Known as the Gray King, he is slowly killing Capa Barsavi’s most trusted men – and using Locke as a pawn in his plot to take control of Camorr’s underworld.

With a bloody coup under way threatening to destroy everyone and everything that holds meaning in his mercenary life, Locke vows to beat the Gray King at his own brutal game – or die trying.

Review:

This book was recommended to me by a friend (the same friend who recommended Circe, funnily enough). And like I do with most recommendations from friends, I didn’t really pay attention to what the book was about, just threw it on my to-read list and picked it up with no expectations and no real idea of what it was even supposed to be about.

I have to take a small detour here and talk about Leverage. Leverage is a TV show featuring a bunch of variously-skilled former criminals (and one insurance investigator) who use their various criminal skills in brilliant and elaborate plans to take down criminals that the law can’t or won’t touch. I adore the show. It’s hands-down my favorite show ever and the only show I’ve loved enough to enjoy fandom content. And if Leverage was on the more dubious side of morally gray, set in a Venice-flavored fantasy world, and led by a teenager who belongs in the definition of “confidence game,” you might get something like The Lies of Locke Lamora.

I don’t know how to write a review of this book except to say that it is really, spectacularly good. It is long, even for a fantasy book, but it needs every single word of that length because there is just so much going on always and constantly. That was the overwhelming feeling I got from reading – that everywhere I looked and even in the background, there was so much going on. The action never stops, it just swings back and forth among perspectives and times. The main story of Locke and company pulling their scam and running up against the Grey King is interspersed with bits from Locke’s past, from the history of the city and nation, and other things happening in Camorr at the same time. And it’s not just Locke against the Grey King, oh no – that would be far too simple for the audacity of this book. There are no less than five, and arguably up to eight, different factions fighting for their own goals for their own reasons (and two of them are Locke himself).

A large part of what makes this book so hard to review is that the details are revealed in layers. It starts out with a crew of talented thieves and grifters preparing to run an elaborate con on a pair of nobles. Okay, I thought, A fun and adventurous heist story. Cool. And then the story begins to peel back the layers to all the competing factions, all the factors at play in Camorr, all the plans set in motion and beginning to come to a head, and suddenly the highly entertaining and audacious heist is one of the least interesting parts of the story.

Everything is happening all the time and you’re constantly getting more information and nothing is ever what it seems. You may have gotten through three twists and finally think that you’re at the truth of something finally and you’re probably wrong. Very few solid answers are available to any but the most perceptive reader (definitely not me) until the very end. And I adored it. It was somehow both incredibly dark and a ton of fun, full of plot twists, overlapping schemes, audacious plans that somehow delightfully work, and steady slow reveals that felt like repeatedly handing me puzzle pieces and requiring me to figure out where they went while I was still receving more puzzle pieces.

I didn’t know going in that this was a series, but you’d better believe I’m reading the next book. And I very much hope that it’s more of the same.

The Gentleman Bastard series:

1. The Lies of Locke Lamora
2. Red Seas Under Red Skies
3. The Republic of Thieves
4. The Thorn of Emberlain

Review: A History of Wild Places

Title: A History of Wild Places

Author: Shea Ernshaw

Genre: Thriller with Magical Realism elements

Trigger Warnings: Gaslighting, murder, blood (mentions), death, childbirth, pregnancy, alcohol use, alcoholism, suicide (mentions), torture, emotional abuse, infidelity (mentions), injury, violence, domestic abuse, ableism, gun violence (brief), death of parent (mentions), drug abuse (mentions), grief, fire (one scene), confinement

Back Cover:

Travis Wren has an unusual talent for locating missing people. Hired by families as a last resort, he requires only a single object to find the person who has vanished. When he takes on the case of Maggie St. James—a well-known author of dark, macabre children’s books—he’s led to a place many believed to be only a legend.

Called Pastoral, this reclusive community was founded in the 1970s by like-minded people searching for a simpler way of life. By all accounts, the commune shouldn’t exist anymore and soon after Travis stumbles upon it…he disappears. Just like Maggie St. James.

Years later, Theo, a lifelong member of Pastoral, discovers Travis’s abandoned truck beyond the border of the community. No one is allowed in or out, not when there’s a risk of bringing a disease—rot—into Pastoral. Unraveling the mystery of what happened reveals secrets that Theo, his wife, Calla, and her sister, Bee, keep from one another. Secrets that prove their perfect, isolated world isn’t as safe as they believed—and that darkness takes many forms.

Review:

I picked this up for the cult-like commune, mainly. I’m a sucker for stories of cult members discovering that there’s something rotten behind the perfect facade of their cult, and I thought this book might have some of that.

Except I was immediately engaged by Travis and his hunt for the missing Maggie St. James. He’s a loner – no family, no home, nothing to live for, on the verge of driving into the wilderness and disappearing forever. But he can see visions of the past by touching associated objects, and that makes him damn good at finding missing people. Maggie has been missing for five years and a friend convinces Travis to take the case. He visits the place where Maggie’s abandoned car was found and discovers a hidden path deep into the woods. His investigation through the deep empty woods is peppered with his backstory and how he ended up here, five hours deep into a snowy forest.

But as the back cover tells us, he vanishes too. When the story switched to the alternating perspectives of Theo, Calla, and Bee, it very nearly lost me. None of those three characters – curious Theo, fearful Calla, and bold but blind Bee – engaged me nearly as much as Travis did. But I was at least curious enough about what happened to Travis and Maggie to keep reading.

I guess it was really strong curiosity, because after Travis is out of the picture, the story slows to a snail’s pace. It’s such a slow burn that you don’t even realize anything’s on fire until nearly halfway through. But I really did want to know what happened to Travis, especially since the few clues I was given added up to “this makes no sense at all.” And around the halfway point, it did pick up. Characters started realizing other characters were keeping secrets, clues started popping up that filled in a few answers but left more questions, and I started to get hints of just how sinister things were under the surface of Pastoral.

This was the kind of book that kept me coming up with theories for the true answer, and even though I did guess all the reveals, for most of them I formulated the correct guess only a few pages before the reveal. (One I did guess pretty far in advance, but it was more because my plot psychic tendencies immediately jumped to “this is the most shocking option so it’s obviously the answer” than any actual on-page evidence.)

This book was significantly slower than most books I enjoy, but it was well-plotted, I only saw one of the big twists coming, and it managed to keep me engaged and asking questions up until the end. I don’t think it will end up on any Bluejay’s Personal Favorite Books lists, but I’m glad I stuck it out and finished the story.

Review: Battle Royale

Title: Battle Royale

Author: Koushun Takami

Genre: Dystopian/Thriller

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of children, blood, murder, gun violence, injury, death of parents (mentions), grief, pedophilia (mentions), trafficking (mentions), sexual assault (attempted), sexual content, homophobia (mentions), rape (mentions)

Back Cover:

Koushun Takami’s notorious high-octane thriller is based on an irresistible premise: a class of 42 junior high school students are taken to a deserted island where, as part of a ruthless authoritarian program, they are electronically collared, provided with weapons of varying potency, and sent out onto the island.

If they are in the wrong part of the island at the wrong time, their collars will explode. If they band together to save themselves a collar will explode at random. If they try to escape from the island, they will be blown up. Their only chance for survival lies in killing their classmates.

Review:

This was a recommendation from a friend (the same friend who got me to read the Dark Tower series, incidentally). It’s the original “kids forced into a game where they kill each other until only one is left” story. It pioneered the idea that The Hunger Games made mainstream, gave a name to the entire battle royale video game genre, and the book where Fortnite got 95% of its rules and mechanics. Forty-two fifteen-year-olds are together on an island, and only one can make it out. (It is clarified that they’re fifteen, Japanese junior high is apparently a different age range than American junior high.)

Think of some adjectives that might describe a book like that. You might think of words like “violent,” “gory,” “dark,” and “bloody,” or perhaps even “sad” or “horrifying.” But I bet you won’t come up with the two words I’d use to describe the first half of the book: “Slow” and “political.”

The class starts with forty-two students, but our protagonist is Shuya, who teams up with his best friend’s crush Noriko and standoffish transfer student Shogo for the duration of the contest. The killing starts immediately, and the story switches perspectives often to show how everybody dies, but it keeps coming back to Shuya and Noriko (and Shogo after he joins them). For roughly the first half, Shuya and Noriko hide and talk about how they can’t believe their classmates are just killing each other, and after Shogo joins them there are several long political monologues discussing the fascist government that made this dystopia happen and all the problems with authoritarian governments. It’s a little weird going back and forth between Shuya and company’s story – which is mostly survival, disbelief, and political discussion – and the violent deaths of their classmates.

Reading this as an audiobook was not the best way to read it. The narrator kept the same patient tone of voice regardless of whether he was talking about sports, politics, or kids killing each other, and since I’m not very familiar with Japanese names, it got very confusing to keep the characters straight. It doesn’t help that there’s forty-two of these kids and many of them have names that sound very similar when spoken – Yukie, Yumi, Yuki, Yuko, and Yuka are five different characters. The descriptions, conversations, and deaths were sometimes difficult to follow, as I had to take a moment to figure out which classmate was currently being discussed.

About halfway through, Shuya and Noriko finally accepted that their classmates were killing each other and Shogo ran out of things to say about politics, and the story finally picked up. Despite all the deaths, it didn’t feel like the action got started until this point. After that, though, the action picked up, the plot started moving, and I actually started liking Shogo as a character. The rest of it ended up being pretty good, and there were two minor twists at the end that I did not see coming.

Battle Royale was not entirely what I was expecting. Yes, you get the gore and horror and survival elements of a bunch of kids stuck on an island until all but one is dead, but there’s also a remarkable amount of commentary on fascism and authoritarian governments, and considering the deaths start immediately, I found it surprisingly slow to start. But I pushed through, mainly because a friend recommended it, and it did get better. Overall, it was actually pretty good. Definitely not my favorite, but solidly good.

Review: The Drowning Kind (DNF)

Title: The Drowning Kind

Author: Jennifer McMahon

Genre: Suspense/Thriller

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of parent, death of child, drowning, psychological horror, death of animals (mention), pregnancy, childbirth, mental illness, forced institutionalization (mentions), alcoholism, unhealthy family dynamics, cancer (mentions), self-harm, infertility, drug use

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 59%

Back Cover:

Be careful what you wish for. When social worker Jax receives nine missed calls from her older sister, Lexie, she assumes that it’s just another one of her sister’s episodes. Manic and increasingly out of touch with reality, Lexie has pushed Jax away for over a year. But the next day, Lexie is dead: drowned in the pool at their grandmother’s estate. When Jax arrives at the house to go through her sister’s things, she learns that Lexie was researching the history of their family and the property. And as she dives deeper into the research herself, she discovers that the land holds a far darker past than she could have ever imagined.

In 1929, thirty-seven-year-old newlywed Ethel Monroe hopes desperately for a baby. In an effort to distract her, her husband whisks her away on a trip to Vermont, where a natural spring is showcased by the newest and most modern hotel in the Northeast. Once there, Ethel learns that the water is rumored to grant wishes, never suspecting that the spring takes in equal measure to what it gives.

A haunting, twisty, and compulsively readable thrill ride from the author who Chris Bohjalian has dubbed the “literary descendant of Shirley Jackson,” The Drowning Kind is a modern-day ghost story that illuminates how the past, though sometimes forgotten, is never really far behind us.

Review:

I can’t remember what exactly enticed me to pick this up. Maybe I found the idea of a wish-granting spring that takes in equal measure to what it gives intriguing. I think part of it is my library put it in a list of popular supernatural-based horror titles and I’m trying to expand my reading horizons. Regardless, I read it – or at least I tried to.

First, there’s Jax. While I was initially put off by her being a social worker who by her own admission isn’t self-reflective, I could definitely relate to being the ordinary child overshadowed by a charismatic sibling. In my case said sibling was younger and wasn’t naturally good at everything like Lexie, but being the forgotten good child while a charismatic Problem Child got all the attention is a situation I know all too well and created an instant connection with Jax.

I didn’t have that same connection with Ethel, whose story alternated with Jax’s. She wasn’t bad, but I didn’t see how her story fit into Jax’s and found her sections much less interesting.

I think this story was supposed to be a slow burn, but it ended up just being slow. I read 59% of it, and in that time, Ethel had gone to the hotel and wished for a baby, and Jax had gone to her grandmother’s estate to deal with Lexie’s death, cleaned the house, went to the funeral, and realized that Lexie had been investigating the pool (which is fed with water from the spring). The suspense was driven by the hints that there was something in the pool, and by the time I stopped I had worked out what was in the pool but Jax had just started to get curious about what Lexie was working on.

I thought this was supposed to be some sort of suspense/thriller thing with supernatural horror and I wasn’t getting any of that. I knew enough about the spring to feel like I already knew what it would take from Ethel, but not enough about it to know if it would want something from Jax. Lexie was already dead, and since nobody else that I knew of had made a wish, it didn’t feel like there was any threat. The only suspense was coming from the question of what exactly was living in the spring (which I figured out fairly quickly) and why the spring granted wishes and took things in return (although I got the feeling that the only explanation I was going to get for that one was “it’s supernatural”).

Admittedly, suspense/thriller isn’t my genre, so this all may be me more than the book. But I wasn’t getting any suspense or thrills out of this, and the slow burn ended up just being slow to me. The Drowning Kind just isn’t my book.

Review: The Da Vinci Code

Title: The Da Vinci Code

Series: Robert Langdon #2

Author: Dan Brown

Genre: Thriller

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, death of parents, suicide (mention), gun violence, kidnapping, car crash (mention), murder, self-harm, ableism

Spoiler Warning: This book is second in a series, but since I haven’t read book one any spoilers in this review are entirely accidental.

Back Cover:

While in Paris on business, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum. Near the body, police have found a baffling cipher. While working to solve the enigmatic riddle, Langdon is stunned to discover it leads to a trail of clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci – clues visible for all to see, yet ingeniously disguised by the painter.

Langdon joins forces with a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, and learns the late curator was involved in the Priory of Sion – an actual secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci, among others.

In a breathless race through Paris, London, and beyond, Langdon and Neveu match wits with a faceless power broker who seems to anticipate their every move. Unless Langdon and Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine puzzle in time, the Priory’s ancient secret — and an explosive historical truth — will be lost forever.

Review:

I picked this up not because I particularly wanted to read this book (thrillers aren’t usually my thing), but because I got in trouble in high school for looking at this in the library because “it’s heretical” and I was in the mood for a little heresy.

I want to preface this by saying I do not hate this book. A lot of this review is going to sound critical, but this book is a perfectly acceptable reading experience.

That said, this whole book has the feeling of being written to be a bestseller – like those big-budget action movies that are more about cool stunts and firey explosions than plot and characters. This book is focused much more on the fact that there is a Big Secret, this secret is shocking and titillating, and the protagonists have to solve riddles, visit historical sites, and dodge antagonists to find it. Everything else is incidental.

The two protagonists – Robert and Sophie – are basic stock characters. Robert is a middle-aged bachelor professor whose academic expertise is in something relevant to the riddles. Sophie is beautiful and sexy and also has some knowledge necessary to solve the riddles but she needs to be taught the details by the more knowledgeable Robert. Of course there’s romantic tension between the two, which is absolutely bizarre because at the beginning of the book Robert takes a minute to miss a woman who I assume was Sophie’s counterpart from the first Robert Langdon book, but then she is entirely forgotten in favor of the smart (but not as smart as Robert) and sexy Sophie.

If you think about it too hard, the plot is very contrived. Yes, it’s supposed to be difficult to get at the Big Secret in order to keep it safe, but beneath of all the Dangerous To The Church and We Are In Danger and other adult trappings put over it, it’s basically one of those scavenger hunts you give to kids with riddles to solve to take them to a location and get a new riddle until they find their birthday present at the end. It’s not even subtle – the book draws the parallel explicitly. It wasn’t boring to read, but looking back a few days after reading you realize there’s no real substance to it.

The antagonists were really underutilized in this story. Religious fanaticism is a fascinating force and could have thrown an interesting, unpredictable element into the plot. But there was only one actual religious fanatic among the ranks of the antagonists, and he was unquestionably and undeviatingly obedient to to the larger forces, who were motivated by comparatively boring stuff like money and power. It kept him from introducing a chaotic element into the story which I would have loved to see. Religious fanatics could have made fantastic opponents in this book but Dan went for the boring stuff instead.

And after all that, I really don’t think revealing the Big Secret would be as damaging to the church as everybody in this book seems to think. Maybe it’s different for Catholics, but grew up among Protestants who regularly and repeatedly ignore, explain away, or outright deny facts that they don’t like. (I can guarantee you’ve seen this in action with all the covid denialism in the news right now.) Archaeologists could literally exhume Jesus’s body with signed agreements between Paul and Peter that Jesus never rose from the dead and they were gonna make up a religion around him, and most Christians would call it fake and somebody would write a bestselling book pretending to be an archaeologist and “disproving” the find. The contents of The Da Vinci Code‘s Big Secret are nowhere near enough to shake the faith of almost every Christian I know.

The amateur religious scholar in me also wants to point out that the noncanonical gospel quotes used in support of the Big Secret’s realism were either mistranslated to the point of paraphrase (Gospel of Philip) or Dan filled in gaps in the existing manuscripts with his own words to fit the idea (Gospel of Mary). And he completely made up translations and origins of words to make the Big Secret sound more plausible. Do not read this book to learn anything about the actual religious history or archaeology behind the ideas because almost everything in this book is wrong.

I can absolutely see why this became a bestseller. The Big Secret is titillating and sacrilegious and given just enough plausibility to seem possible in the real world, and the characters work just fine as vehicles to steer the reader through a large-scale scavenger hunt with danger and action and religious symbolism leading to big conspiracies and secrets. It’s a fairly enjoyable book. But it lacks any real substance. It has nothing to give it depth or meaning, very little to give it interest beyond the sacrilegious nature of the Big Secret, and nothing to make it worth rereading. It’s the kind of book that one would describe as “a diversion” or “highly marketable” – the kind of thing that will sell, and is perfectly readable as a bit of fluff, but lacks anything worth sinking your teeth into.

The Robert Langdon series:

1. Angels and Demons
2. The Da Vinci Code
3. The Lost Symbol
4. Inferno
5. Origin

Review: The Shawshank Redemption

Title: The Shawshank Redemption

Author: Stephen King

Genre: Thriller

Trigger Warnings: Imprisonment, prison, institutional abuse, murder, gun violence (mentions), violence, forced labor, rape/sexual assault, racism, racial slurs

Back Cover:

Andy Dufresne, a banker, was convicted of killing his wife and her lover and sent to Shawshank Prison. He maintains his innocence over the decades he spends at Shawshank during which time he forms a friendship with “Red”, a fellow inmate.

Review:

My husband loves Stephen King’s books and really wanted me to try another one after I really wasn’t sure what I thought about Salem’s Lot. He recommended this one. I’ve watched the movie version of The Shawshank Redemption twice and loved it both times, so I decided to give the book a shot.

I think novellas are a good thing for Stephen King, because one of my main criticisms of Salem’s Lot is that the dude knows how to write but the book was about a hundred pages too long. The Shawshank Redemption is much better because as a novella, there isn’t time for meandering descriptions.

The narration doesn’t really allow for a lot of flowery anything, anyway. It’s narrated as a manuscript written by Red, a prisoner serving a life sentence in Shawshank Prison who is so impressed with fellow prisoner Andy Dufresne that he writes down Andy’s story in Shawshank. It’s not very heavy on description or even dialogue, but it manages to be engaging and evocative anyway. Reserved, intelligent, and selfpossessed Andy is so different from the average Shawshank inmate that he makes an impression on everyone – guards, wardens, other inmates, and other prisoners alike. Red, the man in Shawshank who can get you anything for the right price, grows to respect him.

If you’ve seen the movie, it sticks pretty close to the book so you’re going to know all the major plot points. But it’s the little details that really make this story. How prison works, backgrounds on the crime that put Andy in prison, Andy’s interest in geology – it all wraps together into a remarkably good story. If you listen to this as an audiobook, it almost feels like you’re listening to an old guy tell interesting stories about his time in prison for four hours.

I am very glad I read this book, and if you like the movie you’ll probably like it in book form too. I might try The Green Mile next, since it’s another of Stephen King’s non-horror works and my husband thinks since I liked this one so much I’ll like that one too.

Review: Full Fathom Five

Title: Full Fathom Five

Series: The Craft Sequence #3

Author: Max Gladstone

Genre: Urban Fantasy Legal Thriller, sort of

Trigger Warnings: Unreality, death, blood, medical procedures, torture, body horror, mind control/outside forces controlling your body

Spoiler Warning: This book is third in a series, but since I haven’t read any of the other books, any spoilers of the rest of the Craft Sequence are purely accidental.

Back Cover:

On the island of Kavekana, Kai builds gods to order, then hands them to others to maintain. Her creations aren’t conscious and lack their own wills and voices, but they accept sacrifices, and protect their worshippers from other gods—perfect vehicles for Craftsmen and Craftswomen operating in the divinely controlled Old World. When Kai sees one of her creations dying and tries to save her, she’s grievously injured—then sidelined from the business entirely, her near-suicidal rescue attempt offered up as proof of her instability. But when Kai gets tired of hearing her boss, her coworkers, and her ex-boyfriend call her crazy, and starts digging into the reasons her creations die, she uncovers a conspiracy of silence and fear—which will crush her, if Kai can’t stop it first.

Review:

It’s a little weird of a decision to jump into the middle of a series without reading the previous books, but I had good reasons. First, the Craft Sequence is a bunch of stand-alone books (and a few games, weirdly) in the same world with a few repeating side characters but no overarching plot across books. Second, I read the descriptions of some of the other books but Full Fathom Five sounded the most interesting. I’m a sucker for unique takes on deities, and a person who makes gods to order was too good of an idea to pass up.

That said, the Craft Sequence doesn’t seem to be a great book to jump into wherever. The world in this book is rich and fascinating and well fleshed out … somewhere that isn’t on the page. Things are thrown in here and there that hint at there being much more history and culture and technology and whatnot than you actually get to see, and I ended the book mostly confused about whether this . Honestly, reading the link I put explaining the genre (relink here) and playing one of the Craft Sequence choose your own adventure mobile games helped me understand more about the world than this entire book did. I highly recommend both; the game is free with ads.

That is my only criticism of the book, though, and it probably is partially my fault for skipping the first few books. I adored the idea of building gods, and Kai as a priestess who creates made-to-order idols for people to keep their souls safe from the more dangerous actual gods. I loved seeing Kai work in her job and work to uncover what exactly is going on with all of these idols dying. There’s a lot of twisty turns and surprises, and Kai is stubborn and a rulebreaker and that makes her fun. She somehow manages to be shocked and surprised a lot yet still end up plotting three steps ahead of everyone else. I can’t really put into words all the coolness that is Kai in this story.

Izza is another point-of-view character who isn’t even mentioned in the back cover. She’s a street kid who steals in order to eat, and she wants to leave the island because she’s almost old enough that getting caught would get her put in a Penitent – horrific stone exoskeletons that subject you to physical and mental torture until you submit to the law. She’s also the street kids’ storyteller, the one who talks to the gods that come to them and leads the mourning ceremonies when those gods die. She’s not essential to Kai’s plot, but she has her own story and provides more perspectives on the central issue of gods and idols and maybe-deities dying, plus another interesting cast of characters and settings on this god-creating island.

There is a lot to this book, and in some ways I’m not surprised worldbuilding got mostly left out because everything else wouldn’t have fit otherwise. Even lacking much of the context of the world, it was a fantastic adventure with a fantastic premise and fantastic characters, and I love so many of the ideas that went into this book and this world. I may read some other Craft Sequence books just to see what happens. (And maybe play some more of the mobile games. The one I linked previously is a TON of fun and very replayable.)

The Craft Sequence:

There are two potential “orders” for this series – the order in which they were published, and the chronological order within the world. I’ve listed them below in publication order, and you can put them in chronological order from the numbers in the title (except Ruin of Angels, which is last. This article explains more.

1. Three Parts Dead
2. Two Serpents Rise
3. Full Fathom Five
4. Last First Snow
5. Four Roads Cross
6. Ruin of Angels

Review: This Body’s Not Big Enough For Both Of Us

Title: This Body’s Not Big Enough For Both Of Us

Author: Edgar Cantero

Genre: Mostly Detective Noir, a tiny bit Thriller, a little Dark Comedy

Trigger Warnings: Transphobic terminology (mention), blood, death, guns, self-injury, pedophilia (mentions), intravenous drug use, car crashes

Back Cover:

In a dingy office in Fisherman’s Wharf, the glass panel in the door bears the names of A. Kimrean and Z. Kimrean. Private Eyes. Behind the door there is only one desk, one chair, one scrawny androgynous P.I. in a tank top and skimpy waistcoat. A.Z., as they are collectively known, are twin brother and sister. He’s pure misanthropic logic, she’s wild hedonistic creativity. A.Z. have been locked in mortal battle since they were in utero … which is tricky because they, very literally, share one single body. That’s right. One body, two pilots. The mystery and absurdity of how Kimrean functions, and how they subvert every plotline, twist, explosion, and gunshot–and confuse every cop, neckless thug, cartel boss, ninja, and femme fatale–in the book is pure Cantero magic.

Someone is murdering the sons of the ruthless drug cartel boss known as the Lyon in the biggest baddest town in California–San Carnal. The notorious A.Z. Kimrean must go to the sin-soaked, palm-tree-lined streets of San Carnal, infiltrate the Lyon’s inner circle, and find out who is targeting his heirs, and while they are at it, rescue an undercover cop in too deep, deal with a plucky young stowaway, and stop a major gang war from engulfing California. They’ll face every plot device and break every rule Elmore Leonard wrote before they can crack the case, if they don’t kill each other (themselves) first.

This Body’s Not Big Enough for Both of Us is a mind-blowing, gender-bending, genre-smashing romp through the entire pantheon of action and noir. It is also a bold, tautly crafted novel about family, being weird, and claiming your place in your own crazy story, that can only come from the mind of Edgar Cantero.

Review:

Despite how dark and downright horrifying this book can be at times, This Body’s Not Big Enough for Both of Us was, overall, astonishingly fun.

Adrian and Zooey are conjoined twins. Except instead of having two torsos, or two heads coming out of one torso, or an abnormal number of limbs, or something like that, they share a body with two arms, two legs, and one head – perfectly normal to look at. They’re two separate people sharing one body and one brain – Adrian has the left half, Zooey has the right. Adrian is pure calculation and logic, and Zooey is pure emotion and hedonism. And they hate each other.

But together, they make a really good private eye. So when the police department calls them in to help an undercover cop prevent a gang war, they get in a little bit over their heads, especially since Adrian is actually trying to get things done and Zooey gets them in trouble by acting on impulses and feelings and never thinking things through. Zooey worked really well as as foil for Adrian, but I really liked him the best. Neither of them were exactly good people, but I related much more to Adrian’s logic than Zooey’s free-spiritedness.

This book does get really dark. There’s car crashes, guns, gory murders and injuries, questions of what exactly a minor child should do when she knows her father’s a mobster and how to cope when the polar opposite sibling you hate shares your body, the trauma of growing up abandoned and medicalized because people think you’re insane and having people see you as a medical curiosity or a dangerous maniac but never as a human being, Adrian’s trauma of being asexual while Zooey is a nymphomaniac, and the question of whether the siblings trying to hurt each other counts as siblings fighting or self-harm. But despite all that, the writing style and Zooey’s inability to be anything approaching serious, it manages to be mostly lighthearted and sometimes even laugh-out-loud funny.

This book breaks the fourth wall a lot. In some ways it doesn’t seem intentional, since Zooey is a little nuts anyway and seems to fully believe that she’s the protagonist in a book. So like, sort-of fourth wall breaks. It fully leans into the wacky weirdness of two siblings who hate each other in one body, and was highly entertaining. It wasn’t perfect by any stretch, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Review: Loot

Title: Loot

Author: Jude Watson

Genre: Suspense/Thriller

Trigger Warnings: Blood, falling, death of parents, police, foster care system, drowning (mention)

Back Cover

On a foggy night in Amsterdam, a man falls from a rooftop to the wet pavement below. It’s Alfie McQuinn, the notorious cat burglar, and he’s dying. As sirens wail in the distance, Alfie manages to get out two last words to his young son, March: “Find jewels.”

But March learns that his father is not talking about a stash of loot. He’s talking about Jules, the twin sister March never knew he had. No sooner than the two find each other, they’re picked up by the police and sent to the world’s worst orphanage. It’s not prison, but it feels like it.

March and Jules have no intention of staying put. They know their father’s business inside and out, and they’re tired of being pushed around. Just one good heist, and they’ll live the life of riches and freedom most kids only dream about.

Watch out! There are wild kids on the loose and a crime spree coming …

Review

I think technically this could be classified as middle grade, since March and Jules are twelve years old, but the subject matter tends towards the more dark and serious (the book literally starts with March watching his father die), so it would also fit just fine in the younger end of YA. And also I enjoyed it a ton despite being too old for most middle grade books.

Our two main characters, March and Jules, were separated as toddlers after their mother died. Their father left Jules with her aunt, a performer running underground Cirque de Soleil-style shows, to be raised as a performer, and he took March and raised him as a thief. They end up in a group home for a little bit, but get fed up really quickly and escape with the help of Izzy and Darius, two other kids from the group home who round out our heist group for the rest of the book.

There are many, many entertaining heists in this book. The “one big heist” from the back cover is actually a series of heists to collect a set of seven moonstones that may or may not be magical but definitely have someone willing to pay seven million dollars for them. And they’re not the only thieves after these stones, so there’s also some spy-vs-spy-style action trying to thwart the other theives’ plans, and occasionally steal from other thieves. I am a fan of shows like “Leverage” and general heist action, so this was so enjoyable to read.

It’s not 100% heist action fun, though. There’s a lot of emotional depth with March dealing with the grief of losing his father, Jules dealing with the anger of feeling like her father never wanted her, both of them trying to learn to trust their newly-met twin, and creating a found family out of a long-lost twin, a claustrophobic hacker, and a strong and surprisingly kind troublemaker. Izzy and Darius also have some emotional depth to their characters, mainly of the reckoning-with-the-effects-of-shitty-parents type, but that doesn’t get explored a lot.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was a delightful heist adventure, but it also had a solid emotional core, and it was a wonderful read all the way around. And are the moonstones really magic? You’ll have to decide that for yourself.

UPDATE: Turns out there’s a sequel. I’m not sure if I’m going to read it – Loot was a prefectly complete adventure all by itself, but if the sequel is as much fun as this one was, it might be worth it.

The Loot series:

1. Loot
2. Sting