A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

Last week I reviewed What Strange Creatures by Emily Arsenault.  This week I'm reviewing the same author's fifth novel, The Evening Spider .  I've read and reviewed all of the authors novels so far, and there's a sixth coming next year.  This novel has some supernatural overtones which is a departure from her previous novels. Initially I was really on the fence with this one. Its depiction of a 'hysterical woman,' who is really a woman who doesn't conform to the contemporary social norms of her time, and as a result is committed to an asylum in the 1880's for the convenience of her husband, is a story that is disturbing and difficult for me to read.  This story line is coupled with the foreboding and foreshadowing in the present time story line that implies that the modern day woman may be headed the same way.  However, as it turns out the former woman is committed for far more sinister reasons than her non-conformity to social norms of the day. In...

I'm catching up on some of my reading.  I caught up on Anna McPartlin's novels, and now I'm catching up on Emily Arsenault's novels.   What Strange Creatures is the fourth novel by Emily Arsenault, and I have reviewed her three previous novels on the blog here , here , and here .  I really enjoyed the tone and narrator character of this novel.   What Strange Creatures seems a little wittier and grittier than Arsenault's previous novels.  It was a quick read, and it was hard to put down. When Theresa's brother Jeff's girlfriend Kim fails to return after a weekend away, Theresa begins a bumbling investigation, tracking down the woman's roommate, ex-boyfriend, and former professor to suss out leads regarding Kim's whereabouts.  Initially Theresa's primary motivation is find out when Kim will return because Theresa would 'like to be relieved of dog sitting duties' after agreeing to dog sit Kim's dog for the weekend.  Subsequently Th...

Miss Me When I'm Gone is Emily Arsenault's third novel.  Her first two were reviewed previously on the blog.  Go  here and here to read about them.  Now that there are three I can see similarities--all three feature themes rooted in different areas of the literary world (there was the dictionary publisher setting in the first one, poetry appearing in a high school journal connected to a disappearance in the second, and the last manuscript and its research are the whole point of this third outing) and these last two also deal with themes of friendship and disconnection.  Neither of these latest two novels have settings as original as the first that was set in a dictionary publishing company whose stores of entries on index cards hid a decades old mystery. After Jaime's old college friend, Gretchen, is found dead at the bottom of a treacherous, poorly maintained, concrete staircase, Jaime is asked by Gretchen's family to serve as unofficial literary executo...

In Search of the Rose Notes is Emily Arsenault's follow up to The Broken Teaglass , a novel previously reviewed here on the blog.  I was looking back at previous posts and when I clicked through Teaglass ' I decided to head to amazon to see if Arsenault had published a follow up yet.  Sometimes these new authors can be tricky--some take forever to publish another novel, some never publish another novel.  I'm still waiting for Ronlyn Domingue's follow up novel to The Mercy of Thin Air --and I've been waiting five years for it!  I'm also wondering when Katherine Howe will publish a follow up novel to The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane .  Anyway I went to amazon and that's how found out Arsenault had published a second novel. While Notes doesn't have as unique a premise as the setting of a dictionary company, poetry plays an integral role in this novel.  The narrative is split between 1990 in the months leading up to and those following the disappe...