I've just finished reading Feral. I'll admit I felt it was just a tad pretentious to start, but the concept of rewilding won me over.
In many ways it matches my own feelings and ideas about the natural world.
I would highly recommend Feral to anyone who has any interest in the nature and ecology of our seas and forests.
4,5/5 stars 😁
I’ll rate this somewhere between 3.5 and 4 stars. It took a long time for me to actually finish reading this book. I picked it up and put it down so many times, because I was annoyed with the main character’s personality and behavior and I didn’t exactly enjoy the pacing. But once I finally was determined to finish it, everything I thought I knew about the story changed. Sarah Pearce wrote so many plot twists and turns, I never would’ve guessed the truth on my own. Besides the mystery of solving the murders was also Elin’s journey to the truth—not only of the current situation but also of her past. After all she’s experienced at Le Sommet, I hope she continues on a path of healing.
Side note… The truth behind the murders and the horrifying past of the hotel???? I almost want to call it unhinged.
@bookstodon I don’t think the novel is classified as horror, but the shit that was happening back in the day when the building was a sanatorium can only be described as something straight out of a horror movie. #bookreview
MYSTERIES IN A MAGICAL VILLAGE and a confusing love…quadrangle? pentangle? have a cheery spirit medium seeing double. Cozy paranormal mystery is loaded with charm. SOLID B
It's been awhile since i've posted here! I've been making a lot of changes to my indie website and hadn't gotten around to updating the feeds for this portion until today.
I've read a couple books since my last post though! Losing Hope by #ColleenHoover, and A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah Maas. I am SO shook by #ACOTAR, I literally ugly cried through the last couple chapters. 😭 Can't wait to read the next! #BookReview on that coming soon!
#bookreview on "Northanger Abbey"
I absolutely identify myself as Catherine Morland. Loved the #character description and I could relate with her a loooottttttt. Loved it more than the popular "Pride and Prejudice". Awesomely #Austen is such a nice initiative big kudos to Hachette!
The overview of my September reading includes two brilliant novels, one from India, the other from Italy; a theatrical memoir from someone who knew absolutely everyone; three collections of short stories with some unforgettable tales; a wonderful book of poetry celebrating a special indie press; and a wildly enjoyable literary meta-fiction.
THE MAGIC OF MOVIES has a terrifying side in this expertly crafted horror thriller. Gorgeous, supple prose, memorable characters, and a vivid evocation of Mexico City in the 1990s add punch to the twisty plot. A MINUS
Today's indie author review! You Can Do Magic by R.L. Merrill:
"A very intense and emotional read... it's a good book, a love story between two guys brought together by the fates and other interferences, and some smiles and quite a few chortles."
Looking at this book, I didn't realize until I looked more closely at the cover art, that it was an overhead shot of people, gathered around a wide empty middle space. That one image communicates a lot about power and control. It's a great set-up for the tone of the novel.
This is about an extraterrestrial contact, both sudden and consequential, with huge hulking powerful spacecraft. The people in this story are stunned by the presence of the alien ships and don't know what to think. Nothing they were seeing fit into their expectations of reality. How could this be happening? Why? What did it mean? What would happen next? It threw people into a state of heightened sympathetic nervous system response, which is of course, unsustainable. They also could not have known that part of the reason why the aliens were so bold was due to the fact that they already had folks in place who knew they were coming. When you think about it, that's really the only way a species can confidently appear in the atmosphere of another occupied world.
So, not only did the ships appear in the skies suddenly, they acted suddenly. Unlike the movie "Independence Day" these aliens weren't here to destroy cities. They just stole the people. They stole every person in a whole city, tossing any vehicles the people had been in, as if the cars were crumpled up burger wrappers. Hot trash rained down from the atmosphere for days. It's a premise I haven't yet seen in alien invasion stories, and I have to say, I dig it. It really works. At this point, I have big "Don't get on that ship: To Serve Man: It's a cookbook!" vibes, but the real reason for the alien abduction is more complex that I anticipated.
After this horrifying beginning, when people around the world could only imagine the worst about what might happen to those taken by the aliens, the story suddenly shifts to introduce a Scottish Psychiatrist with a highly unusual patient. What prompts her to connect her patient's elaborate seemingly delusional story to this sudden gruesome group disappearance? Well, first we need to hear his story for ourselves.
And what a story it is. This man explains who he really is, and why he is here on our Earth. There are 23 of those like him, and this detail made me smile, because there are 23 pairs of chromosomes which form the genetic makeup of a human being: gene expression all encoded in our DNA in a very specific pattern combination of proteins: Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine, and Thiamine: A G C T. And, if human beings can be reduced to letter sequences (extremely long letter sequences in the genome, but still), why can't machine-based sentience also be called "life," just created by numbers: 0 and 1? Both are codes, after all. It's an intriguing premise. It's like a little Easter egg in the story.
And, I have to say that the reference to the sudden Cognitive Revolution, a rapid change in early humans ability to think, build, and use tools in new ways, has always bothered me. It wasn't gradual. It was sudden and drastic, especially for the other types of early humans, who were wiped off the face of the earth. It's a great vector for any number of conspiracy theories, so why not aliens? The author taps into our discomfort with the vaguest unexplained parts of human history. It's smarter than many narratives on this point.
The author could have made all the aliens cold and monolithic in nature, but he didn't. It seems more likely that they would still have individual characteristics and variations. A couple of them might even have mixed emotions about the humans. It felt charming, hopeful, warm-hearted even, to think that one of the aliens would have the heart to warn the descendants of one of his favorite people, that she should flee the alien ships. It gave me the same feeling as the Biblical scene where God Himself gently closes the door on Noah's Ark, or when God walks alone in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the evening. The alien has that same combination of deep care and limitless power.
The author writes well, and is especially good at atmospheric description. I loved how he called a gray day in Scotland "a tinplate sky bolted to the heavens." There are many great phrases like that sprinkled throughout the narrative, and not one of them wanders into purple prose. The writing is taut and professional. Hider also has a deft hand in combining two powerful forces: social media and horror, which truly are made for each other. The potential was always there to exploit.
If you know me, I'm always looking for subtext or hidden hints from the author which provide even more depth to the story, so bear with me. Perhaps I'm reading way too much into it, but the fact that the sentient artificial super-intelligence creates 462 "harvesters" to help them gather all the humans, seems like a very specific numerical reference to genetic completeness: each of us humans have 46 chromosomes, 23 pairs from each of our two parents.
I love this kind of stuff. Okay, back to the story: So, how does society react to an alien attack? Do they put their differences aside and work cooperatively towards a solution? Ha ha. No. This is not an episode of "The Super Friends." In real life, people take advantage of any volatility in the social contract, and generally go berserk. When an imminent threat remains murky for too long, people can't stand the uncertainty and create targets for their frustration. The aliens smartly wait them out for a while. The one thing everyone wants is for someone to convince them that that everything is going to be okay. If they can trust in that message, they will refuse to let go of it. It feeds into our most powerful impulses.
I really like how the author presents a wide variety of people's responses to the aliens promises: everything from violent distrust to ecstatic hope. The author also does a great job of moving the story along, carefully adding the right number of characters while ramping up the tension, and never allowing the story to lag. It's an adventure, from start to finish. It's a fun read, and I finished it in one day, because I had to know what was going to happen next in every stage of the story.
Thank you to NetGalley and Black Rose Writing for providing this e-book for review. I'm definitely going to read this author again in the future.
Also, there are two really good books out this year, both titled RIPE. You definitely want to read the other one, too, by Sarah Rose Etter.
Two stories run concurrently & move along at a brisk pace; Burt & his team having to balance the demands of MI5/MI6 with their normal policing activities to uncover the truth.
An easy writing style makes for an enjoyable read with unexpected twists that kept me engaged & wanting to know what happened next. A brilliant place to start this series if you haven’t come across DCI Burt & his team before. Highly recommended. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
THE HAZARDS OF FINDING YOURSELF and creating a lifelong friendship in the midst of unrequited crushes, awkward love triangles, and the overall gloom of an economic recession. Witty, insightful, eloquently Irish coming-of-age novel. B PLUS
Amaka receives a frantic phone call from her friend, Funke, who asks for her urgent help. Why does Funke need help & is she in danger? How will Amaka negotiate her way through the twisting plot of money laundering, corruption & the ever-present influence of mega churches?
An easy writing style which transported me to the heat & intrigue of Nigeria. Highly recommended. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
@bookstodon I suspect that the audience for this book is "people who are looking for different structures and styles." That is me to a "T." So, I really enjoyed DAYSWORK by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel.
Dayswork was so much fun to read, especially that veritable feast of fun facts. What did Herman Melville have to say about American critics? What did Nathaniel Hawthorne's son Julian have to say about Melville? How many species go through menopause, and of those, how many of them are whales? What was the name of the dog in Jane Eyre, and which famous poet adopted that name for their own dog? (The name of Byron's dog is also mentioned, and surprisingly it is a nautical term, and not say, Canem Arrogantis.)
The entire novel is a kind of celebration of absurdity: the learned husband and wife who are both writers and seem to compete for who is most clever and witty, the early pandemic which creates a whole new way of doing everything while stuck in place, the research conducted by the wife who wants to write a book about Melville, the intimate bromance between Hawthorne and Melville, and even perhaps the quest to write a book about Melville in the first place. (Can a book about Melville be its own White Whale?)
The MC, as she dives deeper into her quest to write a book about Melville, discovers that there seem to be more things that cannot be quantified than there are things that can be measured. How shall we measure the patience of Melville's family or of Hawthorne's? What is the correct measure of confidence, or ambition, or even a dayswork, or the precarious state of marriage during already trying times (what the wife compares to "temporal disintegration.")
We begin to see that the (unnamed) wife/narrator is beginning to connect the looseness of pandemic time, the looseness of Melville's fantasies, and the erosion of her own marriage. Her husband seems less solid to her, as if he were there, but not really there, like a remote Zoom call husband.
Melville teaches the writer who would write about him, that fate isn't something that happens to us. Rather, we are fate. We are destiny. Therefore, in order to escape fate, we would have to escape ourselves, which seems a little dark, and about as possible as defeating the sea. Or a global pandemic. Or a marriage which is becoming a ghost of itself.
The writer makes a slew of unparalleled parallels. It is rather stunning. Nothing is mentioned that means nothing. The delving into other poet's and writer's lives is fascinating, especially the tumultuous relationship of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.
Just as Melville tried to use the entire dictionary to express something about life itself, the writer tries to interpret her own life through writers and language.
The reader has to extrapolate the writer's reflections on her own marriage, since she only hints at her conclusions via comparison. Certainly the couple is intellectually engaged. They respect each other and listen to each other, but they seem to share knowledge over intimacy. Even smart people can be unaware that they are becoming unmoored and are drifting.
I found this novel to be whipsmart and engaging, and I will be thinking about it for a long time.