Books and Sensibility

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Fiction

Book Review : The Care and Feeding of Ravenous Girls by Annisa Gray

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 304 pages | Berkeley | Adult Fiction | Release Date: 02/19/2019

I like a book with a really long title. Just throwing that out there.

The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls is this blend of African-American, Women’s and Literary fiction that I’m starting to find myself drawn to more.

This is a very human story of the Butler siblings who are brought together after their seemingly perfect elder sister, Althea, and her husband Proctor are convicted of a crime that shakes up their small lakeside town.

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Spin By Lamar Giles

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 Rating: unrated | 10 hours 50 minutes | Scholastic | YA Thriller | Release Date: 01/30/2019

Last weekend Virginia Beach hosted something In The Water Festival and they honestly should have just started throwing these books out at the audience. Spin is a love story to the underground music scene and the tradition of Tidewater musicians.

DJ ParSec started from the bottom with nothing but her best friend Kya’s tech skills,  mismatch DJ equipment and a passion for music. After blowing up online and gathering a rabid fanbase DJ ParSec was on her way up— until she is found dead– now it is up to Kya and ParSec’s estranged social media manager, Fuse, to find justice.

Giles knows how to write a solid thriller, he keeps the stakes high and has his characters face danger at nearly every turn, especially from DJ ParSec’s most devoted fans whose intense network is keeping tabs on Kya and Fuse.   Along the way Kya and Fuse, who have never seen eye to eye, begin to bond through their shared grief. It was great reading a story about complicated female friendship.

Giles does not hold back when it comes to violence and peril his characters face, but I’ve always found it interesting that the language remains fairly tame.

Spin really taps into the world of social media fandom with a dash of action, and suspense that will keep you guessing until the end.

Check out the audio review on Audiofile

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

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Rating: 4 out of 5.

368 pages | Washington Square Press  | Contemporary | 07/15/2014

Along with  Ikea, The Skarsgard family and fish-shaped candy, Fredrik Backman is the newest Swedish export making money moves in the U.S.

Ove is best described in the novel as “a man with his hands perpetually in his pockets”. He is the human equivalent of the Old Man Yells at Cloud meme. At 59-years old he has a fondness for the way things used to be and fights progress with indignation and a solid hurmph. Ove has a plan for what should come next in his life, a plan that gets turned upside down by the boisterous family that moves in next door, a mangy old cat and a community of unlikely neighbors.

Backman writes with a capricious tone with an infinity for in medias res. This book is translated from Swedish and there were only a few times where I felt like something wasn’t translating

I’m not sure what I expected from this book but it as a lot more fun than I was anticipated. Ove truly becomes an endearing figure,  and I really like stories that explore life in all its stages a la The Curious Case of Benjamin Button or Big Fish.

A quaint, heartwarming story that is satisfyingly earnest and has universal appeal for fans of contemporary fiction.

 

Book Review : The Wake Up by Catherine Ryan Hyde

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  Unrated| 323 pages | Lake Union | Contemporary | 12/5/2017

  I don’t think I would have stumbled upon The Wake Up if I hadn’t been given the chance to review the audio.  It caught my interest because it is published by Lake Union, an Amazon imprint that is marketed as “book club fiction” and because it’s one of those books by an author who has written a  bajillion books, yet I’ve never heard of her.

I’m sure most people will recognize Catherine Ryan Hyde as the author of the book that inspired the movement and movie, Pay It Forward. So every time the person in front of you pays your toll…she’s why (unrelated, someone once paid for my lunch at my work cafeteria and I paid for the person behind me and they were totally freaked out, even after I explained it to them…btw cashier’s must hate this, right ?)

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The Husband’s Secret and Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

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Room by Emma Donahuge

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 Since Brie Larson took home an Academy Award for the film adaptation of this book,  I finally decided to give it a read on audio. Room is told from the point of view of 5-year-old Jack, a boy who has lived his entire life in captivity with his mom in a shed.

I did this on audio and at first I was like nope, nope, nope when I heard  narrator Michal Friedman’s 5-year-old boy voice. But once you settle into the story– it works. I think the little boy voice is close to her speaking voice because she has also done some chicklit with a similar tone. She did a great job and her voice is so unique. I was sad to see she died a year after this came out

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