A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

Before we roll out the extra special surprise next week, let's take a look back on the top viewed reviews.  It's no surprise that the reviews that have the most page views over the life of the blog are all book reviews.  We'll take a look at the top viewed one or two DVD reviews too at the end.  But first we'll count down the top viewed book reviews.   In honor of our tenth anniversary, we'll re-visit the top ten most viewed book reviews starting with the tenth most viewed post and so on.  All reviews will be linked so if one piques your interest, please click the link to read the full review. 10.   Shock Wave by John Sandford is the fifth novel in the Virgil Flowers series.   Flowers is the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension's best agent, and he solves his cases by digging up as much information as he can about the major players connected to the case at hand.  I've reviewed all the Virgil Flowers novels thus far in the series; these ...

Miss Shayne is back with a savage book review!  And stay tuned this week for some special programming on the blog. Reading the synopsis for this book, I wasn't sure I would like Wintersong by S. Jae-Jones. It sounded like a meager fairy tale. Since the cover was beautiful and plastered with appraisals that made reading it seem worthwhile, I decided to take a gamble. Never let me into a casino, folks, because I will never hit the jackpot. Wintersong tells the story of Liesl, who grew up playing her violin for the Goblin King in the Goblin Grove, a clearing in the woods by her house where the Goblin King was able to cross into the world above the ground. In addition to playing her violin, Liesl would play games and make careless gambles, not understanding the gravity of what she was promising the Goblin King. Now that she is grown, the Goblin King expects her to fulfill all that she had promised as a child. Because years have passed, Liesl has forgotten the Goblin K...

Not A Sound is the sixth novel by Heather Gudenkauf.  It's the fourth novel by Gudenkauf that I've read and reviewed here on the blog.  Go here to find those reviews. Two years after a hit and run driver left Amelia deaf and another woman dead, Amelia, a former trauma nurse and sexual assault nurse examiner, is still picking up the pieces of her life.  Still adjusting to being deaf and struggling with staying sober, Amelia is rebuilding her life after her depression and alcoholism caused her to lose her job, her husband, and her young stepdaughter.  Then Amelia discovers the partially nude body of another nurse, who was also a sexual assault nurse examiner and a former friend, in the nearby river on a morning paddle board excursion.  As Amelia's drawn into the homicide investigation, her life is upended and endangered as it never has been before. When Amelia finally lands a part-time job data processing for the local cancer treatment center, she discove...

The Perfect Stranger is Megan Miranda's follow up to All the Missing Girls .  I read and reviewed All the Missing Girls back in January.   The Perfect Stranger differs in structure to All the Missing Girls which largely unspooled its story backwards.  While  The Perfect Stranger follows a more traditional story structure, it is no less gripping. After Leah Stevens torches her career in Boston in pursuit of the truth, a seemingly chance encounter with her former, post-college roommate, Emmy Grey, spurs the two women to move to western Pennsylvania.  Both women are in search of a fresh start and while Leah finds hers as a high school English teacher, Emmy flounders in nameless, nondescript, dead end jobs.  When a woman who bears a striking resemblance to Leah is found left for dead on the shores of the nearby lake, Leah soon realizes that her roommate has been missing for an undetermined length of time.  And Leah realizes that it is the beginnin...

On Living is the second book by Kerry Egan, who is a hospice chaplain and graduate of Harvard Divinity School.  She lives in South Carolina.  This is a very readable, 'unputdownable' book.  For me the first two chapters were slow.  Once the third chapter started, which was the first chapter in which Egan shares one of the stories a former patient told her, I was hooked. On Living is a series of meditations on various themes in the life humanity lives as seen through the lens of counselling and supporting patients who are terminally ill and their families.  Egan often does not meet these people until they know they are in their final months or weeks and have begun hospice care.  Usually the meditation is predicated on the story or stories shared by specific patients.  These stories serve as a gateway to further meditation on a broader theme, such as salvation and change; identity; that there is kindness in the gray areas of life. This is also a ...

A Deadly Thaw is the second novel in the DC Connie Childs series by Sarah Ward.  I reviewed the first book, In Bitter Chill , a couple weeks ago.  The third book, A Patient Fury , will be released in September.   Thus far each book revolves around a present day mystery that connects to a previously unsolved crime in the distant (or not too distant) past and Childs and/or DI Sadler twinge on to the sense that they're 'missing something' in the case file, such as some key piece of evidence, that will make all the puzzle pieces fall into place.  Both In Bitter Chill and A Deadly Thaw exposed a dark and depraved secret that essentially broke the case wide open for the detectives. In 2004 Lena Grey was convicted of and served time for the murder of her husband, Andrew Miller, having suffocated the man in the couple's marital bed.  Now over a decade later the newly dead body of Andrew Miller turns up in Hale's End, a local, long abandoned mortuary, having been s...

The Fifth Petal is the third book by Brunonia Barry.  I read and reviewed her first book, The Lace Reader .  Her second novel was The Map of True Places , and I read that one, but apparently I did not review it for the blog.  All of Barry's novels are part of The Lace Reader series.  They all take place in Salem, Massachusetts, and the third one features characters from the first two novels as well as new characters. The setting in Salem is important to the story, and it couldn't be set any place else.  The rich history of a city still scarred by the infamous witch hysteria of 1692-'93 plays a distinctive, heavy role in the story itself.  And the history of the witch trials and their victims is as fascinating as the story. On Halloween a trio of teen boys harasses Rose, Salem's resident "banshee" and outcast woman, and when a god awful shrieking starts, the ring leader of the trio falls dead.  Thanks to his connections to an influential family ...

Miss Shayne returns this week with another review!  This title is new to teen collection at the library. This book follows the individual stories of Juliet and Declan and how they become intertwined. Juliet’s mother recently passed away and to help cope with the sadness, Juliet writes letters to her mother and leaves them at her grave. One day, a letter is discovered by Declan, who is doing community service in the graveyard after getting drunk and crashing a truck into a building. Declan reads the letter, relates to what Juliet wrote, and writes a response. This begins an anonymous correspondence between the two. When they are in school, these two don’t get along. Juliet is an artistic student who has had a hard time getting back into the swing of things since her mother’s passing, and Declan is an outcast who seems to only have one friend: Rev. Even though they run with different crowds at school, Declan and Juliet get along when they are writing anonymous letters to...

Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions is the first book by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie that I've read.  Adichie has written several award winning, best selling novels and a short story collection.  When one of Adichie's friends writes to ask how to raise her daughter feminist, A Feminist Manifesto is the resulting compilation of fifteen suggestions for how to accomplish this task. Dear Ijeawele is very much a manifesto for how Adichie lives and thinks as a feminist; it's a codification of her own personal feminism in addition to being a primer on feminism, the ways in which society and the world conditions, raises, views, and treats women differently from men, and gender justice issues.  It is both thoughtful and thought provoking. Adichie's fourth suggestion begins with a warning regarding Feminism Lite or what I would still call subtle misogyny masquerading as feminism and concludes with the point that society has conditioned us to view po...

In Bitter Chill is the debut novel by Sarah Ward; it's the first book in the DC Connie Childs series.  I didn't realize this was the start of a series when I started reading it.  Just as when I read and finished The Dry by Jane Harper, I didn't realize that too was the start of a series.  I'm not sure how I feel about starting more book series.  But then the book series that I followed, I haven't been reading anyway, so maybe it's time for some new book series.  This series is set in Derbyshire, England.  And while the prologue didn't really grab me, once I read the first couple chapters, I was sucked in. While there is a mystery in the present day story, it's very much tied to an unsolved kidnap from 1978.  The present day chapters are sparsely intercut with chapters that flash back to 1978.  Were it not for the kidnap case in 1978, there wouldn't be a present day mystery to solve. In 1978 when Sophie Jenkins and Rachel Jones are kidnappe...

The Widow's House is Carol Goodman's 12th novel.  I've read all except for her three YA novels ( Blythewood series) and the literary fiction novel that precedes this one, River Road .  I've reviewed most of them for the blog, and if you click this link , you can read those reviews.  Many of Goodman's novels have a literary theme or connection.  In this novel the main characters are writers/novelists, one of whom is a former composition professor at the local college while the other two are his former students.  This is a creepy, atmospheric, suspenseful mystery.  Goodman's story sucks you in from the beginning right through to the tense, pulse pounding ending.  It's a page turner that you won't want to put down. Jess Martin is a famous writer, whose follow up to his stunning debut is about a decade overdue.  Clare is his wife, an equally talented writer, who has given up writing in order to take a steady job as a copy editor for a publisher...

The Dry is the debut novel by Australian writer Jane Harper.  Set in Australia, it's an expertly written mystery that doubles as a tense coming home novel.  Compared to the last book I read, Everything We Keep , The Dry features much stronger, organic writing. When his childhood friend, Luke Hadler, butchers his family and then kills himself, Aaron Falk, now a successful federal agent, returns to the rural, farming town that literally ran him and his father out in the middle of the night over a decade ago.  Aaron is determined to stay for the funerals and be gone the next morning.  Meanwhile, the only people welcoming him home are the parents of his deceased friend Luke and his childhood friend, Gretchen, who is now a mother herself.  The whole town, save for the handful of residents who have moved there in the interim since the Falks departure, makes it clear that Falk is not welcome and regards him askance while the Deacon family openly regards him with ...

So many things to say about this book, you guys.  So. Many. Things.  I was conflicted while I was reading this book because on the one hand if some soap opera drama went down, this review was going to be one long rant.  On the other hand if nothing happened, then I would have been disappointed because I felt like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop in this novel from the second chapter.   And if nothing ever dropped, I would have felt cheated. I'm just going to warn you now.  I may sound like an unhinged bookworm in this review because of the drama that goes down in this book.  If you watch a lot of soap operas or telenovelas or if you read a lot and have an overactive imagination, then many of the plot developments will be predictable but no less polarizing.  The epilogue, you guys, is a big, fat, heartbreaking cliffhanger. Everything We Keep is Kerry Lonsdale's debut novel.  It's been out a while, and I think Lonsdale may have al...

Pennsylvania One Book. Every Young Child. is an annual campaign that "encourages adults to read daily to the young children in their lives and to engage children in conversations and experiences around the story and illustrations."  These practices help develop early emergent literacy skills in babies and young children and provide a deeper reading experience for the child.  The campaign runs in April of each year, and each year a new title is selected.  This year's title is Daniel Finds a Poem by Micha Archer.  You can go to www.paonebook.org  for more information on the campaign, this year's title, and to see titles from previous years.  You can also access a 64 page activity guide, a fun guide, rhymes, songs, and more under the Resources tab of the main menu. While Micha Archer has previously illustrated other books, this is the first book she has both written and illustrated.  Archer is a former kindergarten teacher who has traveled the world...

I've previously read and reviewed six of Sharon Bolton's novels when she was writing and publishing under the pen name S. J. Bolton.  You can click this link to see those reviews.  Among those novels were three stand alone novels and three novels that are part of the Lacey Flint series (there's a fourth Flint novel and another stand alone novel that I haven't read yet as well as another stand alone novel that will be published soon).   Little Black Lies is a return to form for Bolton in that it's a stand alone book after four Flint novels.  Bolton also harnesses the use of a unique setting as character Little Black Lies much the same way she did for her first three novels.   Little Black Lies is a tautly written, highly suspenseful story that will keep you guessing through its final pages. Little Black Lies is set in the Falkland Islands, an archipelago located three hundred miles off the coast of Argentina.  While the islands are under British sov...

Our guest reveiwer, Miss Shayne, returns this week with a new review! This semester I am taking a class called Research in Literary Studies. Before you get too bored, this class is strictly on everything Alice in Wonderland . We started by reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , Alice in Wonderland spinoffs inspired by the original book, and watching several Alice films. I then had to choose a book that was based on the original Alice in Wonderland and write a report on it. I’m grateful I got to pick a book to read this semester because I’m often forced into reading literature that I don’t care for, but this book was a bad choice. I decided to read Insanity by Cameron Jace. In this story, Alice Wonder has been in a mental institution for the past two years. Two years ago, she accidentally killed everyone in her class. She doesn’t remember that incident or anything she did before being admitted into the asylum. The only ray of light in her life is the tiger lily she is all...

I remember I came across The Day I Lost You by Fionnuala Kearney sometime last year before it was published, and I had to wait months for its release.  Kearney is a British writer, and this is her second novel.  I haven't read the novel that preceded this one, but from what I read of the blurb and the first few pages, both novels deal with similar themes.  Secrets and infidelity (and probably a secret love child thrown in for good measure to make everything extra messy) figure prominently in both novels.   The Day I Lost You is an engrossing read with a side of suspense--as in who's the baby daddy and will the main character bite the bullet and finally get it on with her bff now that they're both single at the same time? It's been ten weeks since Jess's daughter, Anna, was swallowed by an avalanche in the French Alps while on holiday, and, without a body to bury, every day has been a dark struggle to keep her head above water.  The only thing that's keepin...

Missing Pieces is the sixth novel by Heather Gudenkauf and the third Gudenkauf novel that I've read.  I previously read and reviewed her debut novel, The Weight of Silence , and her third novel, One Breath Away .  Gudenkauf has another novel on the way in May called Not a Sound .  Gudenkauf consistently delivers gripping, engrossing thrillers, so I'm looking forward to Not a Sound in May.  So I read Missing Pieces , and I had opinions (lots of opinions) before I was even through the second chapter.   But I'll get to those later. When Jack Quinlan's beloved Aunt Julia takes a fall and ends up in the hospital, Jack and his wife Sarah fly back to the small town in Iowa where Jack grew up and that Jack has endeavored to leave behind forever.  As soon as they arrive Sarah can tell that something is off with the family.  There are strange family dynamics.  There's tension between Jack's cousin Dean (Julia's son) and Jack's sister, Amy, who found J...

Frozen Charlotte is the third novel written by Alex Bell who has seven books to her name, some of which belong to the horror genre.   Frozen Charlotte , a young adult novel, is a creepy, strange, mysterious ghost story.  It is a terrifying read for much of the novel especially once the reader intuits just what is actually afoot regarding one of the characters. Following a frightening and bewildering incident with a ouija board cell phone app in a cafe, Sophie's best friend, Jay, drowns in a freak biking accident on the way home.  Dealing with her grief over Jay's death and determined to find out exactly what happened that night, Sophie travels to the Isle of Skye to stay with her uncle and cousins, Cameron, Piper, and Lilas, over vacation while her parents go on a long planned trip to California.  By the end of the novel this inciting mystery will be eclipsed by the story of the disturbing evil that is source of the nail biting horror. Sophie fears she and Jay...

Under the Harrow is Flynn Berry's debut novel.  It's a fairly gripping, fast read with chapters that fly by--due in part to their brevity as well as the engrossing story.  Set in England, the story takes place in a small English village about an hour's train ride from London. When Nora arrives to visit her sister Rachel for her semi-regular weekend visit, Nora is shocked to find a brutal blood bath in her sister's home instead, and at its center, her sister's lifeless body, viciously stabbed nearly a dozen times.  Unmoored by her grief and with little faith in the police detectives' ability to find her sister's killer, Nora embarks upon her own investigation to find both her sister's murderer and the man who brutally assaulted Rachel and left her for dead when she was a teenager.  Is it possible her sister's attacker and murderer were the same man? The police investigation reveals to Nora the secrets her sister kept even from her.  There was R...