March Minireviews – Part 3

I dream of a day where I’m reviewing books from only, like, two months ago instead of three!

Sometimes I don’t feel like writing a full review for whatever reason, either because life is busy and I don’t have time, or because a book didn’t stir me enough.  Sometimes, it’s because a book was so good that I just don’t have anything to say beyond that I loved it!  Frequently, I’m just wayyy behind on reviews and am trying to catch up.  For whatever reason, these are books that only have a few paragraphs of thoughts from me.

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen – 3.5*

//published 1814//

It’s tough to decide sometimes which Austen is my least favorite – Mansfield Park or Emma.  I just finished the latter, after reading the former in March, and I’m still kind of undecided. The problem with MP is that Fanny is so freaking apathetic about everything in her life except for Edmund.  She’s definitely the Austen heroine most influenced by being “in love” and unfortunately I really don’t like Edmund either (such a twat) so it’s hard for me to really empathize with Fanny even on that.  The ending is also so strange and rushed, just basically “haha they get married after all, eventually, and trust me, they’re super happy!” like… I’m not actually convinced, Jane.  MP has its moments and definitely has some Austen humor to get it through, but I do think it’s overall the most boring of Austen’s novels, with Fanny as the most passive of heroines.

Andy & Willie by Lee Sheridan Cox – 4*

//published 1967//

This is just some old random 1960s book I picked up somewhere along the line.  I think I may have read it way back in the day, but it had been so long I couldn’t even remember if I liked it.  (One would think that since it is still on my shelves, it meant I liked it.  Unfortunately, that’s not always true haha)  But I actually really did enjoy this one a lot.  It was surprisingly funny.  Basically, it’s just a kid telling about his life and adventures in the small Indiana town where he lives.  He and his best friend are always getting into scrapes, and Cox does a great job of letting the older readers in on the reasons why some of Willie’s adventures end up the way they do, even if Willie himself is perplexed by the way adults’ minds work.  This isn’t really a book you’re likely to find around, but if you do, it’s definitely worth a read.

Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie – 2*

//published 1904//

This was March’s fairy tale for the #FairyTaleReadAlong on Litsy.  For most of the fairy tales, I read an adaptation, but in this case I had never actually read the original so I decided to give it a try, and wow was it dreadful.  It’s violent and creepy and weirdly hateful towards adults in general and parents in particular.  I think maybe some parts were supposed to funny, or tongue-in-cheek??  But to me it just came across as bizarre and I didn’t like it at all.  What really sent me over the edge was a line in the final chapter/epilogue – “Mrs. Darling was now dead and forgotten” – just… wow.

The Boomerang Clue AKA Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? by Agatha Christie – 4*

//published 1933//

First off, real talk, why would you ever publish this book under the second title??  It literally gives away half the plot?!  At any rate, this was another great Christie novel with absolutely delightful main characters and plenty of entertaining humor and rather ridiculous adventures.  And let’s be real, the actually question is, why didn’t they KILL Evans?!  I mean seriously!

Defiant Dreams by Cheri Michaels – 3*

//published 1985//

This was one of those random paperbacks from the box of Regency romances I bought from ebay eons ago.  This one is actually set in the US during the Civil War and is about a southern belle who has to go north for safety and ends up staying with relatives in Gettysburg.  Spoiler alert: the war comes to her!  Of course she falls in love with a northern soldier, etc. etc.  This wasn’t a terrible story, but it jumped around a lot instead of actually explaining things.  There are also scenes that just make no sense, like when she calmly removes a bullet from a soldier’s side as though she’s had literally any kind of training in this??  There were just too many moments like that, where the protagonist magically knows how to do something, for me to really get into this one.

March Minireviews – Part 2

More reviews from the depths of time!!

Sometimes I don’t feel like writing a full review for whatever reason, either because life is busy and I don’t have time, or because a book didn’t stir me enough.  Sometimes, it’s because a book was so good that I just don’t have anything to say beyond that I loved it!  Frequently, I’m just wayyy behind on reviews and am trying to catch up.  For whatever reason, these are books that only have a few paragraphs of thoughts from me.

Penne Dreadful by Catherine Bruns – 3.5*

//published 2019//

This was a pretty average cozy mystery.  The MC, Tessa, just wasn’t super bright and tended to get on my nerves.  Her husband has died recently in a car wreck, but now there is suspicion of foul play.  Despite the fact that Tessa goes on and on about how happy their marriage was and how much she loved her husband, she immediately believes literally every bad thing anyone says about him.  Like if my husband died in a car wreck, it would take more than someone telling me they saw him in a coffee shop to convince me that he was up to something nefarious, but Tessa just rolls right over with “ohno he was obviously hiding so much from me!”  Sounds like a great marriage! *eye roll* Anyway, this was a perfectly fine cozy, but nothing about it inspired me to read the next book in the series.

The Breakthrough by Daphne du Maurier – 3.5*

//published 1966//

This is a short story that someone gave me as a gift a while back.  While it was a perfectly interesting tale, it’s billed as “creepy” and it definitely fell short of the mark.  There was no point in the story where I felt anything particularly eerie or creepy was going on.  Ah well.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis – 5*

//published 1950//

I’m always wanting to reread old favorites and never seem to have time, so when various groups on Litsy decide to do chapter-a-day buddy reads, it really suits me quite well.  In March, a group started reading through the Chronicles of Narnia in published order and I’ve been really enjoying revisiting these classics.  LWW was just as fantastic as I remember it.  Yes, it can be a little heavy-handed on the metaphor aspect, but it’s still an excellent story, with Edmund’s story arc being one of the best examples of a character redemption that I can think of.  Plus, these stories are very much mixed with nostalgia for me, so I’m not remotely objective about them!

Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling – 4*

//published 1998//

Speaking of revisiting old favorites, I’ve still been participating in the Litsy buddy read of Harry Potter as well.  The slower pace has definitely allowed me to notice more details than I have before.  These aren’t perfect books, and the fandom definitely has some crazies, but I still really enjoy this series.

Blue Smoke by Dorothy Lyons – 3.5*

//published 1953//

We all know I have a weakness for horse stories, and this is pretty typical 1950s fare with a spunky heroine and a perfect horse.  The drama in this one got a little out of control at the end, but it was still a perfectly enjoyable way to while away a few hours – even if the binding didn’t hold up super well!!

Don’t Look Now by Daphne du Maurier 

This is a collection of short stories that included a few, like “The Birds” that I’ve been meaning to read.  Unfortunately, on the whole I wasn’t really a fan of these.  While I love Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel by this author, literally none of these short stories particularly engaged me.  Almost all of them had strange, abrupt endings without any real conclusion, leaving the stories feeling a bit pointless.  Even The Birds, which is objectively a fantastic story with a great concept, super atmospheric, completely engrossing – and then it literally just stops.  No resolution, no explanation, no nothing.  It felt like I was missing a few pages, it was that abrupt.  Several of the stories, like Don’t Look Now and Indiscretion just felt bizarre instead of creepy.  As I’m looking at my notes, I did mark Blue Lenses as “creepy and ominous” but now I don’t really remember what it was about.

All in all, I’ll still keep picking up du Maurier’s work from time to time, but I’m not convinced that short stories are really her forte.

March Minireviews – Part 1

Greetings, friends! Here I am with more reviews from the way-back. Let’s see how good my memory/notes happen to be!!

Sometimes I don’t feel like writing a full review for whatever reason, either because life is busy and I don’t have time, or because a book didn’t stir me enough.  Sometimes, it’s because a book was so good that I just don’t have anything to say beyond that I loved it!  Frequently, I’m just wayyy behind on reviews and am trying to catch up.  For whatever reason, these are books that only have a few paragraphs of thoughts from me.

Books 41-45 of the 87th Precinct Series by Ed McBain

Yes, I’m still working my way through this series. There are only (!) 55 books so I have two batches left!! This group, comprised of five one-word-title stories (Lullaby, Vespers, Widows, Kiss, and Mischief) were a 3.5* average group without anything especially outstanding.  My favorite was Kiss, and my least favorite was Lullaby.  In a weird way, Mischief was the most disappointing, though, because the Deaf Man was the returning villain and it was definitely the worst Deaf Man story yet – jumbled and overly complicated.  This batch (published 1989-1993) continued the trend of weird sex situations, which I find rather bothersome.  Hopefully, as the books move into the 90s, we’ll get over the 80s everything-is-sex motif.  Still, I’ve developed a huge soft spot for the detectives of the 87th and will be a little sad to bid them farewell when I get to book #55.

Meet Me in London by Georgia Toffolo – 3.5*

//published 2020//

I’m always a sucker for a fake relationship trope, and while this one wasn’t anything groundbreaking, it was a nice palette-cleanser in the midst of the gritty 87th Precinct books.  I really appreciate modern romances without explicit sex scenes, so that bumped this one up a little in my ratings even if it was a little slow in spots.

Tonight & Always by Nora Roberts – 2.5*

//published 1983//

It’s rare that I’m disappointed by Nora Roberts, but this was one of those times.  This book was just SO 80s.  The drama was over-the-top, the hero was ridiculously brooding and macho, the heroine was ridiculously independent, several borderline-rapey scenes where the hero grabs the heroine and kisses her into submission, and I spent most of this book just rolling my eyes.  The concluding drama genuinely infuriated me (hint: nothing makes me more angry then women who get pregnant and decide it’s “for the best” to not tell the father), and this is one Roberts book I don’t ever see myself revisiting.

If I Never Met You by Mhairi McFarlane – 4*

//published 2020//

McFarlane is one of those authors I keep meaning to read since I’m always on the lookout for good romcoms.  I decided to choose this one for my contribution to the next round of the traveling book club.  In the end, I did enjoy this one a lot, but it definitely was more of a novel than a romcom.  It’s one of those books that while I did like it a lot, I’m going to end up talking about the negatives more than the positives, but you’ll have that haha

So basically the main character, Laurie, is devastated when her live-in boyfriend not only breaks up with her – but announces that his new girlfriend is already pregnant.  Because they also work together, Laurie has to see Dan/hear about his new family on the regular.  Through a series of events, she agrees to a fake relationship with another coworker, Jamie, with a convoluted plan of staged pictures and social media posts.  Of course, this is romance, so eventually the fake romance turns into a real one, and everyone lives happily ever after.

The problem with this book is that Laurie and Dan had been together WAY too long to make this a fun and fluffy romance – almost 20 years!  So the majority of the book ended up being about Laurie working through the grief of having such a long-term relationship fall apart, which meant loads of flashbacks to their relationship throughout the years.  I felt like this book was a lot more about Laurie and Dan than it was about Laurie and Jamie.  It gave the whole story a really down tone and also meant it felt incredibly unrealistic for Laurie to be into Jamie so quickly.  McFarlane would spend pages telling us about special moments between Laurie and Dan, about the many times Laurie knew that Dan was “the one,” etc. – but then we’re supposed to turn around and believe that Laurie and Jamie are the ones with something special between them.  The whole book would have been so much more believable (and enjoyable) if Laurie hadn’t been with Dan for so long.  As it was, I was almost uncomfortable with her getting with Jamie so quickly, despite the fact that I shipped the two of them and thought they were a great match.

The overall tone of the book also tends to be really sexist against men.  There were a lot of one-off sentences basically dismissing men as sex-hungry neanderthals, and Jamie and his dad are the only two decent guys to make an appearance.  Literally every other male in the story is a total dick.  Laurie also spends loads of time whining about sexism at work and how the men have it easy and the women have it hard yadda yadda yadda despite the fact that her (male) boss is constantly telling her what an awesome employee she is, frequently stands up for her against anyone who says anything remotely negative about her or her work, brags about her to everyone, and recommends her for promotions.  I just couldn’t really buy the “oppressed woman at work” story when Laurie wasn’t remotely oppressed!  A lot of Laurie’s “problems” came across that way – I realize she’s at a low point in her life, but she’s also just so whiny about everything.  It’s hard to empathize with a character who is successful, makes good money, has a boss who respects her and treats her well, has good and supportive friends, and spends all her time whining about how hard her life is.

BUT despite all that I actually did enjoy this book haha  The parts with Laurie and Jamie were SO fun, their banter was fantastic, and they had great chemistry.  I loved the random set-ups they created, and loved watching them both get over their initial prejudices against each other and come to appreciate the other.  I really wish this book had focused more on the two of them and LOT less on Laurie and Dan and the way their relationship failed.

I’ll definitely be checking out more of McFarlane’s books, and if you don’t mind your romances a little angsty, there’s a lot to enjoy with this one.

Rearview Mirror // February 2021

Well friends, we are better than halfway through June and I’m still super behind!! Part of me thinks I should just skip ahead but… I just can’t quite bring myself to do that!!  The good news is that work has calmed way down and I don’t start at the orchard until the beginning of August.  So I have over a month to get my life completely organized and caught up!! I’m confident that’s going to happen.  :-D

Favorite February Read

Even thought 1984 and Murder on the Orient Express technically rated higher, I think I’m going to go with The Electric Kingdom by David Arnold.  Something about the story and the characters just really drew me in, and it’s one I definitely see myself rereading, looking for more clues about the mind-bendy bits.

Most Disappointing February Read

Definitely The School for Good & Evil.  This one just gave me the weirds super hard, which is a shame because the concept sounds really good.  But it was not for me.

Other February Reads

• 3*
  • The Bromance Book Club by Lyssa Kay Adams
  • Of Beasts & Beauties by various authors
  • You Have a Match by Emma Lord
•  3.5*
  • Gods of Jade & Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
  • The Greatest Beer Run Ever by John Donohue & JT Malloy
  • Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
  • A Stranger on the Beach by Michele Campbell
  • The Substitute Guest by Grace Livingston Hill
• 4*
  • The Big Six by Arthur Ransome
  • Harry Potter & the Philosopher’s Stone by JK Rowling
• 4.5*
  • 1984 by George Orwell
  • Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

February Stats

• Total Number of Books Read:  17 (1 Kindle, 16 physical)
• Total Pages Read:  6196
• Average Star Rating for September:  3.5
• Longest Book: Of Beasts & Beauties (810 pages) although it feels like a bit of a cheat since it’s an anthology haha
• Shortest Book:  Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them (88 pages) and actually I never reviewed this one because it was just… there lol
• Oldest Book:  Murder on the Orient Express (published 1934)
• Newest Book: The Electric Kingdom and You Have a Match (published 2021)
• Number of New-to-Me Authors:  10

February DNFs

Only had one DNF in February, a book that’s been on my personal shelves for a long time – The Covered Wagon by Emerson Hough.  I’ll admit that I wasn’t completely in the mood for a pioneer story, but this one, published in 1922, was absolutely absurd.  I read over a hundred pages and it was a complete soap opera, with two dramatic young men in the wagon train competing for the hand of a beautiful young woman.  I finally gave up when she wandered away from the camp, then looked and saw a prairie fire.  In order to alert the wagon train… she STARTED A FIRE AND USED SMOKE SIGNALS.  TO ALERT THEM ABOUT A WILDFIRE.  I just couldn’t deal any more!

TBR Update

This I keep updated as I go, so it’s current as of today, rather than as of the end of February. Still a million years behind on reading blog posts, though! :-/  I’m sure I’ll get caught up over summer break, right?  RIGHT?!

For those of you who don’t know, I’m weirdly obsessive with organizing the TBR, and have it on a spreadsheet divided into six different tabs:

• Standalones:  513 (holding steady)
• Nonfiction:  127 (up two)
• Personal (which includes all books I own (fiction and nonfiction), but lists any series I own as only one entry…):  649 (up eleven!)
• Series (each series counted separately, not each book within a series):  251 (down two)
• Mystery Series (each series counted separately, not each book within a series): 115 (holding steady)
• New Arrivals – (I have a lot of books that I have been gifted or that I pick up somewhere and they get put on my “oh I’m so excited about this shiny new book” shelf… and then of course don’t actually get read.): 137 (up nine!)

Current Reads

I’m doing multiple buddy reads on Litsy.  I should finish a reread of Emma this week.  I’m about halfway through The Magician’s Nephew (CS Lewis) and maybe a quarter of the way through Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix (and yes, Harry is just as obnoxious as ever in this one).  I’m also reading Russian Magic Tales as part of the Food & Lit Challenge where we “visit” a different country every month.  June is Russia, and since I’ve had this one on my TBR for a while it felt like a good fit!!  I’ve also been reading a Nora Roberts romance series and am almost finished with the last book, Considering Kate.

Up Next

The probable next five(ish) reads…

• The Other Typist by Suzanne Rindell is due back at the library, so I need to get it checked off!!
• The Convenient Marriage by Georgette Heyer is my June book for the traveling book club, so also due soon haha
• The Perfect Horse by Elizabeth Letts has been on my shelf (from the library) for literal months now and it’s about time to actually read it!
• I’ve also had the first five books of the Leaphorn & Chee mystery series checked out for quite some time.  If I enjoy them, there are 24 books in the series sooooo
• The World of Pooh is the next book on my quest to read every book I own.

We’ll see what happens!!!  Hopefully coming soon – March minireviews!!!

February Minireviews – Part 3

We’re just going to pretend like it’s perfectly normal to review books three four months after I read them… (because yes, I wrote half this post in May and am only just now coming back to it!)

Sometimes I don’t feel like writing a full review for whatever reason, either because life is busy and I don’t have time, or because a book didn’t stir me enough.  Sometimes, it’s because a book was so good that I just don’t have anything to say beyond that I loved it!  Frequently, I’m just wayyy behind on reviews and am trying to catch up.  For whatever reason, these are books that only have a few paragraphs of thoughts from me.

The Substitute Guest by Grace Livingston Hill – 3.5*

//published 1936//

Are GLH’s books predictable and cheesy?  Yes.  Is that what I want sometimes?  Also yes.  This one was pretty normal GLH fare, but that’s not actually a bad thing in my mind – sometimes I just want something warm, relaxing, predictable, and happy.  It’s rare that GLH doesn’t deliver.

Gods of Jade & Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia – 3.5*

//published 2019//

This was one of those books that I wanted to like more than I did.  While the concept was quite good, somehow the book just lacked magic.  The third-person narrative – which I usually prefer – here felt distant and almost stilted.  There were times that there would be an somewhat lecture-y tone to the tale, filling the reader in on a piece of culture or fable, rather than letting those things be a natural part of the story’s flow.  This was also a book that definitely needed a map, as I had no real grasp on the distances they were traveling.  All in all, while it was a fine one-off read, it didn’t really make me interested in seeing what else Moreno-Garcia has written.

The Greatest Beer Run Ever by John Donohue & JT Malloy – 3.5*

//published 2020//

It’s always hard to review a book that’s memoir-ish, and this one is no exception. The author was in his late 20s during the Vietnam War. He had been a Marine straight out of high school but was considered “too old” to enlist for Vietnam, so he was working as a merchant marine. When the war protests started to turn on the soldiers themselves, the guys from Chick’s hangout-bar thought it would be amazing if someone could go visit all the active duty guys from their neighborhood, take them some local beer, & reassure them that what they were doing was appreciated & they were missed & loved. Chick’s job enabled him to hop on a boat headed to Vietnam with the idea that he would take 3 days shore leave when he got there & find some of the guys. What with one thing & another, his boat left without him, leaving him stranded in Vietnam in the days leading up to & the first couple of weeks of the Tet offensive!

Reading this book is basically like listening to your old uncle tell his stories from the war. It wasn’t a bad book at all, but it did tend to ramble off & sometimes go into back stories not directly related to the main plot & it wasn’t always easy to tell what was happening “now“ & what was an explanation from the past. (i.e. a few paragraphs telling a story to illustrate why Chick doesn’t like ship captains – it was hard to tell if it was THIS ship captain, or one from his past.) Chick is also very pro-unions, which I’m not against unions but I also got a little tired of every chapter having at least a few sentences explaining why unions are awesome & solve everyone’s problems.

For the most part it doesn’t get too political & there’s some great perspective here on how basically the soldiers were just doing their best to do what they were told. Most of them had been drafted, they weren’t passionate about being there, & they didn’t have the ability to see any kind of big picture concerning how the Vietnamese people really felt about the situation. In the end, Chick decides that the protestors weren’t wrong to protest the war, but still felt that harassing the young men being sent to fight wasn’t the right way to execute that protest.

This is a memoir so it’s inherently biased, but was overall an interesting read for a bit of a different look at the war – Chick is pro-soldier, but also a civilian. It was a pretty fast read & I appreciated that the author decided to keep the language pretty clean throughout.

The Electric Kingdom by David Arnold – 4*

//published 2021//

I’ve read a couple of Arnold’s books now and have enjoyed them all.  This one is his newest and I read it as part of my personal campaign to read new books by authors I like as they come out instead of just sticking them on the TBR and maybe getting to them in five years.  This one is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland with a girl who has to take a cross-country journey to find a mythical portal that her father is convinced is real.  She meets up with several other travelers on her way.  This was a book that was eerie and engaging, and one that folded back on itself in a way that was somehow believable.  It had just a few too many unanswered questions for me in the end, but still completely sucked me in and kept me turning the pages.  Like Kids of Appetite, it had elements that it felt like I shouldn’t like, but somehow worked.

You Have a Match by Emma Lord – 3*

//published 2021//

After really enjoying Tweet Cute last year, I was interested to read Lord’s new book.  However, this one just fell short for me.  Mostly, there was just too much going on.  The main character, Abby, finds out that she has an older sister who was adopted.  She and Savvy start communicating without telling any of their parents and agree to meet at a summer camp.  There was a lot of potential here to explore the dynamics between the two sisters and how they related with the adults involved, but Lord’s writing gets sucked into typical YA drama, with way too many pages spent on Abby’s crush on her best friend, Leo.  This was definitely a story that would have been significantly better without the love story aspect.  I was looking for an adoption story with Parent Trap vibes and instead got boring YA-romance angst with bits of adoption drama thrown in.  It made the story feel rather choppy and disconnected.  All in all, it wasn’t a bad read, it just wasn’t for me.