Mini Reviews: Apocalyptic Fiction

I have been in a horrific review slump since June. Maybe longer than that. I’ve got a huge backlog of books that I haven’t written reviews for, and it’s holding me back. Every time I think I should just push forward and forget about the books I’ve read in the past, I feel like I’m holding myself back because I feel the responsibility to go back and review all those books. So, for the next few months, I’ll be posting a mini review round-up every Tuesday until I’m all caught up, and then I’ll hopefully be back in the swing of things! This week I’ll be reviewing five apocalypse books.

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

Jane McKeene has been trained from childhood to hunt Shamblers, folks who have died and risen from the grave. But something is afoot in Baltimore, and even though all Jane wants to do is return to her mother’s home in Kentucky, she can’t help digging in to the mystery.

I’ll admit I didn’t have high hopes for this book. I’m not a big fan of zombies or YA or historical fiction, But I decided to give this a shot on audiobook and I actually did enjoy it! It was a little slow and not as much of a page-turner as you might expect from a zombie book, and it really felt like the first half and the second half were completely different from each other. At another time I might have been more annoyed by this, but in this case it didn’t bother me too much.

I think what I enjoyed with this book was the worldbuilding and characters. I think the late 1800’s is my sweet spot with historical fantasy, having read The Conductors earlier this year and enjoyed it as well (also, I do like 19th century fiction). I just love the technology that is around, because it’s not medieval but it’s not so advanced that it doesn’t feel historical. I really liked Jane as a character and her relationship with her friend Katherine, which developed over the course of the book and was a great payoff. Perhaps the clearest sign that I enjoyed this book, I was highly tempted to pick up the sequel right away, which I pretty much never do.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson

The only people left in near-future Toronto are the poor. Money no longer has value for them; they have rediscovered bartering, farming, herbal medicine. Outside of the city, though, the rich play their own political games—and they’re about to turn to the inner city for their human organ needs.

Brown Girl in the Ring has been on my radar for a very long time, but I have to admit that I didn’t really know anything about it when I started it. I don’t even remember if I knew it was apocalyptic. I certainly had no idea that it was based on Caribbean folklore (thankfully I already had a general idea of some of the folklore, or I may have been more lost). It just happened to find its way onto my audiobook TBR and I picked it up to give it a go. Although the pacing was a little strange (it felt very 90’s), I did end up enjoying it. It was really interesting to me to see a near-future apocalypse, where the collapse of society is due to its inevitable decline rather than a big world-ending event. It felt so realistic which is where the true horror in this book comes from. Although this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, I did like it well enough and would be interested in reading more from Hopkinson.

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

Lauren Olamina lives with her family in a walled-in subdivision in the remnants of Los Angeles. The world outside their walls has devolved into general anarchy, where fire-loving drug addicts and gangs roam the streets. Money is scarce to come by, and few people have legitimate jobs; people have turned to growing their own food and utilizing the barter system to get by. As her father tries to keep their community together, Lauren deals with hyperempathy and records her thoughts about a new religion in her notebook.

Parable of the Sower was published before Brown Girl in the Ring, so my apologies to Octavia Butler for thinking the former resembles the latter when the opposite is true, but that’s the order I read them in. Really, though, they could practically take place in the same universe—the similarities are striking. It was happenstance that I read them so close together, since Parable of the Sower was one of my book club reads, but I’m really glad I did. It was really cool (and by cool I mean absolutely fucking terrifying) to see two authors come to the same conclusion about where we’re heading as a society!

This was a pretty slow-going book, and a pivotal event listed in most blurbs doesn’t actually happen until halfway through. Even though it’s a medium-sized book, it felt really long to me, and I’m not sure if I’d have finished it without a book club deadline to keep me going. However, I think it was really effective as apocalyptic horror because it really made me think about what I’d do if I were to find myself in the same situation. Could I feed myself? Keep myself and my family safe? I live in an apartment, so no. But I think that’s really the mark of great apocalyptic fiction, because it means that the setting was so realistic that you feel like it could happen.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice

The power is out—again. At first, no one thinks anything is amiss. Then two young people manage to find their way back to their Anishinaabe community, speaking of chaos in the south, where society is collapsing following the loss of power. In the face of mounting catastrophe and unexpected visitors, Evan and his community turn to Anishinaabe tradition to survive.

This was such a wonderful little book and totally got me in the mood for winter. Rice’s love for his community and traditions really shines through this novel, and even when the plot seemed completely bleak that love kept me moving forward. Like The Parable of the Sower, this book really made me think about what I would do in an apocalypse, so it was really thought-provoking in that way. I also really loved the balance between suspense/horror and a more quiet, subdued feeling. The title and season of the book was perfectly portrayed through the writing style which made this so successful in my eyes.

I am bummed that it was so short—I blew through this audiobook in just two days, and that’s probably just because I started it toward the end of the work day on the first day. I am super excited for the sequel that is tentatively scheduled for 2022, and I’m so glad that the story isn’t over.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton

S.T. is a domestic crow on a mission: to find a cure for his owner, Big Jim, whose eyeball has fallen out and seems to have succumbed to the disease affecting all of humanity. Along with Big Jim’s dog Dennis, S.T. will traverse Seattle and learn how to bridge the gap between animals and the human culture he loves so much.

This was a quick-witted and unique take on the zombie apocalypse. As a kid, I was a big fan of animal-centered fantasy like Redwall and Warriors, so this was right up my alley, and I was thrilled to discover the ecological bent to the story. I did struggle a bit with the pacing, since S.T. is fairly directionless for a large portion of the novel, and Buxton fell back on a technology-is-evil messaging that frustrated me. However, the character development was top notch and I had a great time with this book from beginning to end. Although I won’t pick it up right away, I am looking forward to the sequel, Feral Creatures.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Women Who Kill: Two Book Reviews

If you’re looking for a fiction and nonfiction book pairing, this is it! I read Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, The Serial Killer a couple weeks ago, and as I was reading When She Was Bad by Patricia Pearson, I realized how well they go together. I knew it would be the perfect opportunity to review two books at once!

When She Was Bad by Patricia Pearson

Release Date	January 5, 2021
Publisher	Penguin Random House Canada
Content Warnings	Murder, Sexual assault, domestic abuse, elder abuse
Did I receive an ARC?	Yes
Links	Indiebound | Bookshop | Kobo | Libro.fm

Who are the serial killers you can think of off the top of your head? Ted Bundy, the Zodiac Killer, Jack the Ripper… Most likely, most of the killers you can think of are male, but that doesn’t mean that women don’t murder, it just means that we don’t talk about them. When She Was Bad presents research covering the different kinds of female killers, from serial killers to domestic abusers to mothers who commit filicide. Along the way, Pearson not only explores what motivates these women to commit murder, but also why society is so quick to forgive them for it.

Although this book is being re-released in 2021 (today, actually), be forewarned that the majority of the book is quite outdated. It appears that little of the content has changed since the book was originally published in 1997, and you come across sentences like “as recently as the 1970’s,” even though 1970 was a full fifty years ago. In the chapter about women’s prisons, there was also some rhetoric about queer women and gender-nonconforming people that felt, to me, outdated, although I’m sure that some people may still use that language. Pearson did write a new chapter for this re-release, about serial murderesses in positions of power—such as nurses who kill their patients—but it is shoehorned in to the front of the book and doesn’t quite fit the flow of the chapters. There is also no discussion about whether the societal situation toward female killers has changed in the twenty years since this was originally published.

If you can accept that the information in this book is not quite up to date, though, it is a super fascinating look into how our society treats female killers, and why the pervading thought is still that serial killers aren’t women. If you are a fan of true crime this is a great read, and although it tends toward the essay side of nonfiction rather than the narrative, it is still very readable and keeps you engaged throughout. The case studies of various women like Karla Homolka, Bethe Wettlaufer, Dorothea Puente, and Myra Hindley are super fascinating and really keep you hooked. I would highly recommend if this is a subject that interests you.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Release Date	November 20, 2018
Publisher	Doubleday Books
Content Warnings	Murder, domestic abuse
Did I receive an ARC?	No
Links	Indiebound | Bookshop | Kobo | Libro.fm

In When She Was Bad, Pearson discusses how murderesses claim to have been abused in order to justify killing their partners, and that is front and center in My Sister, The Serial Killer. Korede is a nurse, and keeps having to clean up the dead bodies her sister produces. Ayoola claims that it’s in self-defense, and Korede will do anything for family… until Ayoola starts dating a doctor that Korede has a crush on.

This short novel has been marketed in some places as a thriller, but it’s solidly in the fiction category. We aren’t trying to figure out who’s killing all these men, we’re along for the ride with Korede as she debates over what she’s going to do about her sister. We’re asking ourselves why she always her sister get rid of the bodies even though she’s sick of it, we’re wondering whether or not she’ll tell the doctor the truth. It is a question of motive, of intention, of excuses. It is more of a character study than a story, but with enough intrigue to push you to the end.

This was a really great book and if you’re a fan of literary horror I think this would be a really great fit. It’s a subgenre that is really growing on me and I’d love to read more from Oyinkan Braithwaite.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Book Buying Habits: How much money did I spend (and save) on books in 2020?

How much money do we spend on books every year?

It’s obviously a very personal question, and depends on a lot of factors. There are tons of adults who spend a whopping zero dollars on books, but there are some online who claim to be spending upwards of $2000 a year. How many books do you read? Are you a book collector with tons of unread books, or do you try to keep your TBR as low as possible? Do you hit up your used book store and sell back books for credit, or do you get the prettiest new release hard cover on the shelf? There are tons of variables, and I personally love to try to get an understanding of how people spend money on books. So in terms of fairness, this is what I spent on books, and what I saved by borrowing books from my library.

The Big Purchase: $107.24

I spent an abnormally high amount of money on books this year, primarily due to my purchase of the Kobo Clara HD reader. I had been reading ebooks on my phone, but that ended up being really bad on my eyes, so I was looking into getting an ereader. It’s definitely an investment, but it was basically the same cost as 4-5 hard covers, so it’s not really too expensive. So far the price per ebook is $10.72, which isn’t too high (especially since most of my ebooks are from the library), but as I use it more that will go down.

New Books: $47.94

I only bought two brand-new books for myself this year, and they were both on the same trip to Barnes and Noble. I’m always quite hesitant about buying books that I haven’t read, because I hate wasting money, and what if they’re bad? But The Fifth Season has so many positive reviews it’s hard to imagine that I wouldn’t enjoy it, and Winter Counts also had pretty high reviews on Goodreads and wasn’t available at my library at the time.

Used Books: $76.96

The big purchases here were two Elfquest books. I grew up with the color Donning editions, which are now out of print, and I just didn’t feel like it’d be the same experience reading them in black-and-white (which are available through Dark Horse). These editions usually go for $25-35 online so it’s a decent chunk of change, but I’d rather grab them all now than wait until they’re really rare.

Ebooks: $34.19

Usually, when I buy ebooks, it’s because I want to read a book (usually because of a book club or something), but I don’t want to spend a ton of money on a hard copy. So here we have some book club reads (Ghost Summer, The Ballad of Black Tom, and The Cybernetic Tea Shop), some literary magazines (FIYAH and Nightmare), some indie books (Anoka and The Last Girl Scout), as well as one book that I picked up because I received the sequel as an ARC (Bursts of Fire).

So those are all the books I bought this year…

But those aren’t all the books I read this year. As of December 16th, I’ve completed 92 books in 2020 (can I squeeze eight more in by January? Probably not) and only ten have appeared on this post. So how do the rest of the books I read stack up?

• Library Books

  58 books (63% of total books read)

• ARCs

  15 books (16% of total books read)

• Giveaways / Free Books

  7 books (8% of total books read)

• Already Owned:

  3 books (3% of total books read)

How much money it would have cost to purchase every book I read for free

$1437.18

• If I had purchased every book I read in hardcover. I took these prices from Bookshop.org, since that is likely where I would have bought them from. One book I read, Wylding Hall, did not have a hard copy available to me since it was only published in the UK, and some books used paperback pricing since a hard cover was not available.

$799.48

• If I had purchased every book I read in ebook format. I took these prices from Kobo.com, which is where I purchase ebooks. Two books I read, Modern Brush Lettering by Becki Clark and Sheets by Brenna Thummler, didn’t have ebooks available. A few books weren’t available on Kobo, so I used the Amazon price.

$1148.61

• How much money I’d have spent if I had purchased every book I read, in the format I read it in. So this also includes audiobooks, which I thought about calculating by itself but it’d be like three grand or something crazy.

So at the end of the year, I only spent $266.33 but without my library I would have spent $1414.94.

All things considered, I think that’s a pretty successful year. It’s higher than normal, for me, but ultimately only about $22 per month, which I think is a pretty reasonable budget. Who knows, maybe I’ll even consider spending a little more next year… Although I’m adopting some kittens in January, so all my leftover budget will probably go to them!

Do you keep track of how much you spend on books? Do you think you should? And, if you’re comfortable sharing—how much did you spend on books in 2020?

Review: “The Indifferent Stars Above” by Daniel James Brown

Release Date	April 28, 2009
Publisher	William Morrow
Content Warnings	Death, body horror
Links	Indiebound | Bookshop | Kobo | Libro.fm

My first read for Nonfiction November! The Indifferent Stars Above is narrative nonfiction about the trials and tribulations of the Donner Party, emigrants to California who, in winter 1846-47, got stuck in the Sierra Nevada and had to resort to desperate measures.

This tale absolutely grips you from beginning to end. Although it doesn’t start snowing until about a third of the way in, the descriptions of life on the Oregon Trail really hooks you in the first section. This book graces the top of many horror nonfiction lists—including my own—and for good reason, since even the descriptions of various ways emigrants died along the trail edges into body horror, and of course it only gets worse as the elevation rises.

As a narrative, I think it somewhat suffers from Daniel James Brown’s choice to focus on one member of the party, Sarah Graves. Although Sarah certainly proves to be a sympathetic and relatable “main character,” information about her is simply few and far between. Although Brown claims to focus on her story, most of her story consists of statements like, “We don’t know what Sarah did or thought at this point but here is a guess.” I don’t have so much an issue with these statements—I think it’s good when historians admit what we don’t actually know, rather than passing guesses off as fact—but I don’t think Brown should have claimed that the book was all about Sarah. Since we know so little about her, you can’t write a complete book about her experience without shifting the focus to other characters frequently. I think Brown did himself a disservice claiming to be focused on her, and should have instead focused on the Graves family as a whole (which he did, in practice).

However, this didn’t detract from the book much as a whole; there were just sections in the beginning and at the very end where I feel like Brown focused too much on it. As a whole, this book was exactly what I was looking for: a harrowing and informative narrative about a doomed mountain expedition. It’s not for everyone; there are gruesome details here, and it’s very disturbing. I’m not sure that I would ever re-read it, and I think it might be a once-in-a-lifetime book. But I was totally hooked all the way through and I think it was fantastic.

5 stars

Review: “The Bone Witch” by Rin Chupeco

Release Date	March 7, 2017
Publisher	Sourcebooks Fire
Content Warnings	Death
Links	Indiebound | Bookshop | Kobo | Libro.fm

Tea didn’t mean to raise her brother from the dead. But when she does, she’s whisked away to Ankyo, the capital of the neighboring kingdom, to learn how to be a dark asha. This is a story within a story, as Tea recounts her adventures to a bard two years later. In Ankyo, she learns the many skills of a dark asha—dancing, singing, playing music, fighting, and necromancy.

The first half of this book is, essentially, a rehashing of Memoirs of a Geisha. Whether or not Chupeco did any additional research about geisha, I can’t tell; Arthur Golden notably stretched the truth in parts of Memoirs, so one can only hope Chupeco did their own research, but the first half certainly lifts a good amount in terms of plot. If you enjoyed Memoirs, particularly the descriptions of the geisha’s clothing, their duties, their hair baubles, and so on, The Bone Witch will be right up your alley.

As for me, I found the first half outstandingly dull. I struggled most with the justification for turning elemental magic-users into fantasy geisha (known as asha). The magic system in The Bone Witch is fascinating: every person has a heart’s glass, which they wear as a necklace and which turns a certain color in their teens. The color of one’s heart’s glass indicates what kind of magic-user that person will be, and the silver heart’s glasses belong to elemental magic users, like Tea (pronounced tee-uh, by the way). Men with silver heart’s glasses are forced into a special armed force, and women become asha. The asha are trained to fight and often become body guards, and necromancers are instrumental in fighting the dark forces threatening civilization, but, inexplicably, an asha’s primary employment is entertaining rich men by dancing, singing, playing music, and conversing. Everyone knows they fight; everyone knows that Tea can raise people from the dead and take down demons, but her worth is inherently tied to her ability to look pretty and dance.

The plot scoots along in slow bursts, and the biggest favor Chupeco did themself is framing the story as a flashback, because the present-day narrative was infinitely more intriguing and really helped move the book along. It sets up a compelling drama where we know where Tea ends up—ultra powerful, banished, and intent on taking over the world—and want to keep on with the main story just to see how she gets there. The ending, in fact, really pushes you to continue the series (although it also sets up a love triangle that makes me want to burn it).

On the one hand, this seems very self-indulgent, as though Chupeco wanted to write about fantasy geishas and nothing was going to stand in their way. However, there are rumblings in this first installment that the strict gender roles and arbitrary asha duties are going to be shook up as the story continues. I may try the next book, if I’m in the mood for it in the future—it’s definitely not completely off the table yet.

3 stars

“Go Tell It on the Mountain” by James Baldwin

This is not going to be so much a review as a response. I just don’t feel like I am in the position to write a review, and, in any case, Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin is a classic and hardly needs more reviews, so to analyze and rate it based on its prose, pacing, and character development feels redundant. This response may contain spoilers.

If you have not read Baldwin’s debut novel, it is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story about John Grimes, who, on his fourteenth birthday, is coming to terms with various aspects of his life—his sexuality, his family, and his religion, primarily. His father is a minister, his mother is a devoted family woman, his aunt is a spinster, and his brother is a troublemaker who comes home that night with a stab wound. After his parents have a tumultuous shouting match in the living room, they as well as John and his aunt find themselves at church for the night, where we gain insight into their lives and John undergoes a spiritual awakening.

I was originally interested in this book because I know that James Baldwin was queer, but I now realize that he explores that more fully in his later books and that it wasn’t particularly present in Go Tell It on the Mountain. However, as the title and the synopsis indicate, this book’s primary theme was religion. Yes, there were aspects of race, gender, sexuality, familial relationships, but it was all through the lens of religion, specifically African American Christianity. I found it really fascinating to read about John’s experience with the Church; there were aspects that were similar to my own experience growing up Christian, but there were also spects that were very different from my own, having grown up in predominantly white churches. It was thought-provoking though, and had me thinking about my own religion and how we interact with it.

I also really loved reading about John’s parents and their stories, which actually makes up about half of this book. Their stories all worked independently, but managed to pick up each others’ threads and weave a complex tapestry of histories, feelings, emotions, and grief. I found it really cool to see how the adults interacted with each other in the present as well as the past, to see how they grew together and apart over the years, up to the point of John’s 14th birthday. Going into the novel, you have very little understanding of the family dynamics, and by the end you have a much better idea of how things go and how they came to be.

The prose really kept it moving. I read somewhere that it was intended to read like biblical text, and it certainly did in some parts, but I really enjoyed how it flowed. Although the novel is quite simple on the surface, taking place over one night with flashbacks, the prose takes you on a delicate journey and is beautifully crafted. I think the prose, above all the other aspects, makes me want to continue reading James Baldwin, because at the end of the day, although this subject matter doesn’t particularly stand out to me, the prose made it such an enjoyable experience that I would love to read more of it.

One thing I always think about with classics is what value they bring to readers of today, and often, tangentially, I think about whether the book would be a good fit in an American high school classroom, since that is where I experienced the majority of my English-language classics. This book feels timeless, in a way; although it is, in some areas, clearly dated, the emotions and feelings are eternal, and it’s very easy to relate to even as a modern reader. However, for the second question, I don’t think it would a particularly good fit in the classroom, except perhaps at a private Christian institution. The most intriguing aspects here are the religious ones, and I don’t think the majority of high schoolers would care enough about the subject to enjoy the book. As an adult, however, I think it would be a great read, and I definitely appreciated it more as an adult than I would have as a teen.

4 stars

Three Books I’m Reading for Nonfiction November

I’m not a big readathon kind of person—between ARCs and my book club, I already have plenty of books to read on a schedule, so I don’t often add a readathon to that pile. However, I really like the openness of Nonfiction November, because the only thing you have to do to participate is read at least one nonfiction book, which seems pretty doable! I’m already planning ahead, and these are three nonfiction books I plan to read next month.

They Were Her Property by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

Although I’ve definitely been reading more BIPOC authors in the second half of the year, I’ve been slacking on my list of books by black authors I want to read by the end of 2020. I figured Nonfiction November would be a great time to pick up the two nonfiction books left on that list, so I got this from my library. The other is Hood Feminism, which has a waiting list, so who knows if that’ll show up by the end of this month! Both made it onto my reading list because they specifically deal with white women’s role in racism, and how white women are not innocent parties in the long history of marginalizing women of color.

And the Pursuit of Happiness by Maira Kalman

My aunt gave me this book as a gift several years ago and I have been dragging it from apartment to apartment with me, and since it’s an art book and is printed on fancy paper, it is heavy! But to this day I still haven’t read it, so this year I am going to read it and hopefully lugging it around will have been worth it. According to the synopsis, Kalman was inspired by the 2008 elections and spends a year investigating democracy across the United States. I think it’ll be interesting to read a more optimistic post-election book when contrasted with pessimistic years of the recent past.

The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown

If you’ve read this blog before, you know that I read a lot of horror books. I’ve been trying to branch out into nonfiction with horror elements, and The Indifferent Stars Above graces just about every list. I actually really enjoy reading nonfiction that I know the ending of—it creates a certain amount of dramatic irony for me. And I’m really intrigued by the nonfiction subgenre of doomed mountain expeditions, so I’m hoping this book will be a win for me.

What are some nonfiction books on your TBR? If you’d like to participate in and find out more about Nonfiction November, be sure to check out their Twitter or A Book Olive’s 2020 announcement video, or over here in the blogosphere, you can check out @WhatsNonfiction‘s post about Nonfiction November. Let me know in the comments down below what books you’re reading in November!

Review: “The House in the Cerulean Sea” by T. J. Klune

Release Date	March 17, 2020
Publisher	Tor Books
Content Warnings	Fatphobia, child abuse, discrimination, prejudice
Did I receive an ARC?	No
Links	Indiebound | Bookshop | Kobo | Libro.fm

The world kind of sucks right now, but books don’t have to. For adults, but with accessible language for all audiences, The House in the Cerulean Sea is the epitome of feel-good literature for those who want to escape their dreary reality.

The book isn’t all sunshine and butterflies. We meet our narrator, Linus Baker, as he slogs through his daily work as a caseworker for DICOMY (the Department in Charge of Magical Youths). He hates his boss, is constantly pestered by his elderly neighbor, and, though he won’t admit it, feels lonely. One day, he is called into a meeting with Extremely Upper Management of DICOMY, and informed that he will be inspecting a top-secret orphanage filled with extremely dangerous magical youths—and to be especially wary of their caretaker, Arthur Parnassus.

Linus isn’t quite sure what to expect, as he isn’t permitted to open his top secret case files until he arrives to Marsyas, where the orphanage is located. When he arrives, he finds six children who possess far more dangerous magic than he could have imagined, but this is far from the last surprise he finds on the island.

Klune packs a lot of ideas into The House in the Cerulean Sea. Throughout the book, we see characters challenge prejudices, explore what it means to be a family and to have a home, and what our purpose is in life—whether it is to do our job in the hope that we can help many people, or seek out love and commitment at the risk of losing what we have become comfortable with. There are, of course, bumps along the road, but by the end of the book Linus has come a long way and completes a warm and loving character arc, and the story is wrapped up neatly with a bow.

If you are looking for some easy-to-read escapist literature during this pandemic, this is the book for you. It’s filled with warm fuzzy feels, sweet and lovable characters, and good messages. If you like stories with older protagonists, especially older protagonists that manage to find a new start in life, this would be a great book (Linus is in his forties). This is largely character-driven, rather than plot-driven, and the characters are wonderful.

I give The House in the Cerulean Sea a solid 4/5 stars. Ultimately, I think this novel was just a bit undercooked—there was a lot that could have been workshopped before publication. The dialogue between characters was often stilted and unrealistic, and I found the world building to be quite lacking. The novel just doesn’t flow as well as I would like, and I really wish more time had been spent in revisions because this could have been a favorite.

★★★★☆

New Release: “Piranesi” by Susanna Clarke

Release Date	September 15, 2020
Publisher	Bloomsbury
Content Warnings	Drowning, Guns, Memory Loss
Did I receive an ARC?	No
Links	Indiebound | Bookshop | Kobo

Piranesi is popping up all over the bookternet lately, due to the affection audiences have for Susanna Clarke’s only other novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, which was published way back in 2004. In the sixteen years that have followed, Clark hasn’t penned a single novel (that we know of), and has only published a collection of short stories, also in 2004. Until Piranesi.

I feel there is little I can tell you about this book without stealing your future enjoyment of it. Piranesi features our narrator who lives in a House filled with endless rooms with marble statues and is regularly flooded by Tides filling the halls. We meet Piranesi as he climbs high above the ground and three Tides roll in at once to flood the room he is in. He is prepared for this, because the tides come like clockwork and he keeps meticulous records. He needs to, because he is also conducted Scientific Research for the only other living person who roams the House, who he calls the Other.

The less you know about this book moving forward, the better. Reading this book is like watching a flower bloom, and leave you with a bittersweet feeling. There is plenty of magic, although the history and reasoning for the magic is left untold, and you only get small glimpses of it. I think the real magic happens in the storytelling. This unfolds at the perfect pace, in a perfect way, you are given small pieces of the puzzle and you put them together right alongside Piranesi.

I’m sure there are people that won’t jive with this book. It’s an epistolary novel told through Piranesi’s journals, and his style of writing can be off-putting. He capitalizes words that he assigns importance to, seemingly at random, and dates his entries with strange titles, like, “Entry for the first day of the fifth month in the year the Albatross came to the South-Western Halls.” In the beginning, you’ll probably have very little understanding of what is going on, and a lot of information is relayed via infodumping—which I found excusable because it was very much in-character. You may not find the answers you are hoping for in the end, and if you are a particularly plot-driven reader you may find this a bit boring.

This is not to put you off. I loved this book and I’m looking forward to re-reading it, I’m just trying to make excuses for you so that when you don’t love it as much as I do, I’m not disappointed. Even if you read all the above and are now thinking that maybe this book isn’t for you, I would still give it a go—it’s a scant 250 pages and a quick read. I read it a little bit at a time over the course of a week or so, and I recommend that approach; this is a book that deserves to be savored.

5 stars

New Release: “Inferno” by Catherine Cho

Release Date	August 4, 2020
Publisher	Henry Holt and Co. (USA)
Content Warnings	Mental illness, psychosis, abuse, pregnancy
Did I receive an ARC?	No
Links	Indiebound | Bookshop | Kobo | Libro.fm

Inferno is the first-person account of author Catherine Cho’s experience with postpartum psychosis and being involuntarily committed to New Bridge Medical Center on the psych ward. As is so often the case with memoirs, it’s challenging to rate this; although not perfect, its imperfections are a reflection of Cho’s life, so it feels strange to criticize them!

The layout of the story is very tightly planned. Cho presents the story in present tense, as if she is still at the ward, and alternates between the present and her memories of the past, from her childhood growing up to an abusive relationship to her relationship with her husband and eventually the birth of her son. Everything leads up to the moment of her psychotic break: her relationship with her parents, her abusive relationship, the stories her Korean grandmother told her about love when she was a child. This is contrasted with her day-to-day routine in the psych ward, as she ponders what she needs to do to seem sane and to leave the ward.

I do think this helped Cho build tension as she reaches the part in the narrative where she describes her psychosis. Although this happens fairly late in the book, we know it is coming because of her descriptions of life on the ward, so we are expecting it—unlike her in the past. As she starts mentioning certain aspects of her life after her son’s birth, we realize that we are slowly spiraling into psychosis alongside her.

If I had any complaint about this book, it would be that the section featuring her psychosis was too brief, but this feels like an unfair criticism. Who am I to demand that Cho relive her trauma just to give me a better story? I’m honestly impressed that she managed to get through writing this book at all. She does explain frequently throughout the book that she and her husband like to keep journals, and that writing in her journal during her inpatient recovery was an important tether to the real world, so for her perhaps it was a way of coping with her situation.

I picked up this book because I watched A Book Olive’s August wrap-up over on YouTube and she described this book as being an intersection between horror and memoir, and I’ve been interested in finding horror-adjacent nonfiction. Although I don’t think the entire book would fall squarely into the horror category, I do totally agree with Olive about how the section about her psychosis does have horror elements, so if you’re like me and want some nonfiction horror, I’d definitely pick it up. If you’d like to scare your pants off about being pregnant, this is great for that, too.

In the end, although this was hard to rate, I am giving it four stars just because it wasn’t quite knock-your-socks-off amazing, which is what I try to reserve my five star ratings for. However, I really don’t have that many complaints about this book and think it was well-written and enormously interesting.

4 stars