Too Long; Didn't Read

Like most avid readers, I'm a sucker for series. The opportunity to spend more time in a world we love, with the characters we love, and the chance to delay the inevitable goodbye we all must bid stories in the end brings out the literary glutton in the best of us. That's why reading Two Dark Reigns , the third book of the Three Dark Crowns series was a given. I was hopefully trepidatious...or was it trepidatiously hopeful...that this entry would live up to its predecessors. *Spoiler Alert* It does. By the way, if you're reading this and you haven't yet read Three Dark Crowns and One Dark Throne , you deserve to get spoiled. Rather than picking up where we left, instead Kendare Blake sends us back 400 years to when the Blue Queen was born to a War Queen who was as badass as her moniker suggests: Philomene...smiled.'It is like a War Queen to bleed so much. But I still think I will die of this.' We learn that a Blue Queen is fourth born followi...

Emily Giffin’s  All We Ever Wanted  may seem genetically engineered to please middle class mom book clubs, where symbolism and foreshadowing are eschewed in favor of white wine and local gossip, but there’s an astute heart beating beneath this suburban story. Nina is a salt-of-the-Earth-turned-upper-class-housewife who fills her days shopping and attending fundraisers while her silver-spoon-born husband writes checks and closes significant financial deals. Her seemingly perfect world is shattered when, thanks to the immediacy and omnipresence of social media, her golden boy son, Finch (a little too on-the-nose for me) sends around a picture taken of a partially exposed “scholarship girl from the wrong side of the tracks.”  This picture throws Nina’s life into upheaval, dredging up her own repressed memories, and introduces us to her co-narrator and father of the victim, Tom, a hands-on single father/man’s man carpenter. The crux of the story is as subtle as a brick, bu...

I’ll admit it: The plot to Octavia E. Butler’s Dawn  sounds like a sci-fi adult movie that would play on Showtime at 2am. Earth and humanity have been all but snuffed out and the remaining humans were rescued by an alien race, only to learn their saviors demand a “trade” in return: To procreate with the aliens and create a hybrid species. *Cue the sexy saxophone music* I may have written it off as such and gone about my merry way if I didn’t know that Butler is a Nebula- and Hugo-Award-winning author. As it was, I went into Dawn  with the expectation of having my preconceived notions wrecked and my mind blown—and it came close. Our fearless hero is Lilith, a strong-willed but open-minded 20-something who spent the last 200+ years in and out of suspended sleep. More than once she “Awoke” in a variation of an inescapable plain room with little to no furniture, occasionally no bathroom, often no clothing, and no interaction beyond a disembodied voice demanding she answer ques...

"Teddy Cannon is a really dumb name." That's my first note on K.C. Archer's School for Psychics . I know, it's not the wittiest or most astute observation, but it would prove to be the narrative thread of the next 368 pages. Of all the issues I had with this book, the most egregious isn't even Archer's fault--it's that of the blasphemer who had the audacity to refer to this as "Harry Potter, but for psychics" in the book description. Then again, that was enough to get me to invest hours of my life, so who's the real fool here? School for Psychics centers on Teddy, a 24 year old millennial stereotype and orphan (√) with a penchant for "timely" references, geriatric idioms, and cringe worthy gambling metaphors. Teddy, who dropped out of Stanford and has trouble with authority (√√) is on the run from a Russian loan shark to whom she owes $270,000 of her adoptive parents' money. Just when she's made peace with her c...

On the surface, Naomi Alderman's The Power is a difficult book to explain. You start off by dipping your toe into pseudo-YA plot synopsis of how one day teenage girls suddenly had the ability to electrocute people with their hands, and before you know it, you're shoulder-deep into a metaphor pool, swimming with religious allegories and jumping off the "feminist doesn't mean better" high dive. It's not an easy book to pin down, and I can't think of higher praise for it--it makes you work for it, not have it spoon-fed to you. Canst thou direct the lightning bolts? Or do they say to thee, 'Here we are'? The Power is the alternate history story of a world where women quite swiftly and decisively cease to be the "weaker sex." Whether through an inevitable evolutionary step, the awakening of something that always was, or conspiracy theory water laced with post-war chemicals, the inexplicable shift changes everything. We get a peek i...

I have something morbid to confess: I've been on a bit of a serial killer kick lately. So when I received The Butterfly Garden as a gift, it felt like kismet. What better complement to the serial killer podcasts, shows, and movies I'd been devouring than a book about a man who kidnaps beautiful young women, tattoos wings on their backs, and keeps them in a gorgeous oasis like pet butterflies? I jumped in with both feet and eyes closed, but The Butterfly Garden didn't exactly stick the landing. The Butterfly Garden opens with Maya/Inara (our protagonist whose real name remains unknown) being interviewed by a detective (protagonist #2) following a harrowing escape from the clutches of serial killer. You don't know much at first except there was a fire, she and a number of other captives escaped, and the cops think she's hiding something (the "payoff" of which, by the way, is incredibly disappointing and Soapy). Now, I'm no trauma expert or FBI a...