Adult Fiction

The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

November 22, 2021 2 Comments

304 Pages | Thomas Dunne Books (Republished by Tor) | 10/24/2017

I’ve been wanting to read Silvia Moreno-Garcia since Mexican Gothic made a splash on the book internet last year. I jumped at the chance to review The Beautiful Ones–not realizing this is one of her backlist titles that has been republished.

Let me tell you

This book was so…odd. It takes the plot of a romantic historical drama and infuses it with magic and fantasy in an extremely subtle way that (while it didn’t make the book less enjoyable) left me wondering why it was there at all?

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The Dry by Jane Harper and One Little Mistake by Lucinda Berry

November 15, 2021 Leave a Comment

I read more thrillers!

The Dry by Jane Harper

Finance investigator Aaron Falk hasn’t visited the struggling farming community of Kiewarra in over 20 years—not since he was run out of town for his association with a dead girl. But when his childhood best friend commits a grisly murder-suicide Aaron is called to attend the funeral and gets roped into the investigation.

This was a solid crime novel, to quote one of the blurbs on the back; it has twists on every page. My favorite thing about Jane Haper’s books are her endings–she writes revelations right up to the last word on the last page.

I’ve been experimenting with crime thrillers this year and this is one of my favorites. I liked that it had a character-driven angle with Falk’s past.

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The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris

November 6, 2021 2 Comments

13 Hours 33 Mins | Simon & Schuster Audio | Literary ? | 6/1/2021

Editorial assistant Nella Rogers is used to being the only Black girl at Wagner Publishing. Then Hazel McCall is hired as a new editorial assistant. Nella is optimistic that the new Black girl–with her activist lineage and “Harlem cool”–will help her challenge the company’s diversity problem. Instead, Nella finds herself slowly pushed out of the comfortable place she secured for herself in the company.

I’m not the biggest fan of books where racial trauma is used like this but I came into this book thinking it was a thriller so I assumed I’d at least get enmeshed in a unique world and it would have compelling plotting. But this book toes the lines more of literary fiction with speculative elements. It has elements of modern Black horror like Get Out and social satire like The Sellout but at the end of the day doesn’t really say anything. I just thought this was kind of silly and found it extremely tedious.

I do not know how to review this book without spoilers so….

*Here be spoilers *

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Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid

October 18, 2021 Leave a Comment

11 hours 5 minutes | RandomHouse Audio | Historical | 6/1/2021

I guess this is my first ‘TikTok made me read it’ book.

I recently learned that is book is connected to The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo so I’m not sure this was the best place to start with Reid but it came in first on my library holds. My experience with this book was like when you watch an amazing TV show you can’t stop talking about and then by the end you just get annoyed but still have to see how it ends.

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The Herd by Andrea Bartz

October 13, 2021 Leave a Comment

336 Pages | Ballantine | Mystery/Thriller | 3/24/2020

I rarely read long-form journalism but I devoured this piece in the New York Times Magazine about the false utopia of the all-female co-working space The Wing, so when I saw this book had a similar premise I had to pick it up.

In this book, the fictional aspirational feminist co-working space is called The Herd and the novel follows the twisty aftermath of disappearance of the founder, Eleanor Walsh.

The Bradley sisters, Katie and Hana, are best friends with the missing Eleanor and as they search for the truth their own dark secrets surface.

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Hollywood Homicide by Kellye Garrett (Detective by Day #1)

October 11, 2021 Leave a Comment

10 Hours 4 Mins | Midnight Ink | Mystery | 8/08/2017

I enjoyed this book and was looking forward to getting more into the series but I just found out Garrett’s publisher closed and the series has been on pause since book 2. Something like this happens to me every time I find a series I like!

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