Month: July 2023

The Bellwoods Game Review

Book: The Bellwoods Game
Author: Celia Krampien
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Year: 2023
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Synopsis: “Everyone knows fall hollow is haunted. It has been ever since Abigail Snook went into the woods many years ago, never to be seen again. Since then, it’s tradition for the sixth graders at Beckett Elementary to play the Bellwoods Game, in which three kids are chosen to go into the woods on Halloween night. However rings the bell there wins the game and saves the town for another year. But if Abigails’s ghost captures all the players first, the spirit is let loose to wreak havoc on Fall Hollow…or so the story goes.
Now that it’s Bailee’s year to play, she can finally find out what really happens. And legend has it the game’s winner gets a wish. Maybe if Bailee wins, she can go back to the way things used to be before everyone at school started hating her. But is Abigail’s ghost really haunting the Bellwoods? One thing’s for sure: something sinister is at play – waiting for them all in the woods…”

Review: While this is targeted to ages 8-12, it was a super enjoyable read for me and definitely felt like it could (and maybe should?) easily be targeted at ages a bit older than 8. While it read like a middle grade book, it had some scarier scenes and talked about death in a way that didn’t necessarily read like something an eight-year-old would be into. Maybe that’s just that it’s been so long since I was 8, but it felt more like an 11-15 to me. All that aside, I thoroughly enjoyed The Bellwoods Game and would love, love, love if Krampien would write a second one.

The Bellwoods Game follows sixth grader Bailee as she navigates the trials of late elementary school, the drama of being shunned by your peers, and the fragility of life as she works through her grandmother’s recent mini stroke. All the while, Beckett Elementary, where Bailee goes to school, is preparing for it’s annual Bellwoods Game – a night in the local forest playing an innocent game of tag. Or is it? Legend has it that every October, the sixth grade class gathers in the woods to play a game, one that feels harmless, but also comes with a lot of superstition, students who were past players who cannot physically talk bout the game, and a passed down and much revered book of rules. The students participate in a lottery to see who will play, with those chosen bringing a gift for the spirit of the Bellwoods forest – it’s their free pass through if they get caught by otherworldly creatures.

Bailee, along with two other students, are chosen to play the game. At the clang of a bell, they must race through the woods, navigating their surroundings in the ever-increasing gloom of a fall evening, and make their way to the bell at the furthest edge of the woods. If they can successfully ring the bell, they town will be safe for another year, however if they fail to ring the bell the town will be thrown into peril, with past failed years bringing bad crops, businesses closing, and other tragedies. As Bailee and her peers rush toward the bell, they begin to experience weird things, see weird sights, and discover that all is not as it seems. In fact, there seems to be a ghost in the woods, or maybe two ghosts; creatures who both want to help and harm the students, able to assist and foil their plans – even going so far as to change the landscape of the woods as the students play.

My biggest complaint with this book was how slowly things unfolded once the kids were inside the woods, however what I felt was quite slow in book form I think would make for the perfect setup in a tv-show. I kept thinking “MAN this would make a great show” and honestly I would be first to watch it if it did! All the ways that things slow down in book form are really perfect for unraveling over the course of a multi-episode season. I also thought the way Krampien ended the book left room for additional books and/or seasons if it ever did become a show – while the ends are tied together well, she set the scene and left the door open for future books, which I would be super interested in if she did! One of the most unique qualities about the book is the fact that Krampien not only wrote it but did all of the illustrations, which we see every few pages in comic book style. They’re cute and really add depth and dimension to an already enjoyable read, even more impressive that she drew them herself.

Advice: If you like cute, cozy, spooky books particularly set in October around Halloween, this might just be your thing! It’s low stakes, and the scene is set so beautifully that even reading it in the middle of summer transported me to a fall day. If you love a fall book, this is for you!

The Woman Inside Review

Book: The Woman Inside
Author: M.T. Edvardsson
Publisher: Celadon
Year: 2023
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis: “Bill Olson, recently widowed, is desperate to provide for his daughter, Sally. Struggling to pay rent, he welcomes a lodger in to their home : Karla, a law student and aspiring judge who works as a housekeeper to make ends meet. Her clients are the Rytters, and incredibly wealthy couple who hide behind closed doors. The wife is ill and hasn’t left the house in months. The husband is controlling and obsessive. Is he just a worried husband, concerned for his wife’s health? Or is there something more sinister at play?
As bill’s situation becomes more dire, Karla is forced to make a difficult choice. And when the Rytters wind up dead and Karla is pulled in for questioning, she’s made to defend some parts of her past she’d rather nor resist.
Every person in The Woman Inside is hiding something, but could any of them really have been driven to kill?”

Review: I had high hopes for The Woman Inside as I really enjoy the nordic noir genre, however this was not the “super well composed chamber drama” I was promised from the back of the book reviews. The Woman Inside is a slow moving study in right and wrong, the legal system, and what justice might really look like outside of theory. For that reason, I found the book interesting, because I do believe that justice, like ethics, comes down to moment-by-moment decisions, particularly where every day true crime is concerned. Unfortunately, The Woman Inside has nothing more to offer than just that, a glimpse as what justice might look like when it tragedy and drama plays out in our every day lives.

The Woman Inside jumps back and forth between a few narrators, each with a different perspective and connection to the victims, unraveling the crime as the book progresses. It offers a unique perspective in this way, as we can see how the faulty justice each character creates is justified in their own minds, something I believe reads true to reality. The bummer of it all, though, is that while this may be true to real life and offer a realistic picture of individual justice, it’s just…boring. I’ve found myself a bit uninterested in writing a review for this book because I finished it and was simply bored. I kept going over and over the book, not in the way you chew on a good book for a long time after you’ve finished reading it, but in the way you chew on a bad book, hoping desperately to find some hidden meaning you might have missed; something that will tie it all together and make it more worthwhile, the “aha! there it is!” moment. The Woman Inside did not offer any part of that for me, no matter how many times I went over it in my head, I came back with the same conclusion: it’s boring.

The story, in my mind, was not begging to be told. There wasn’t anything about it that drove me to want to know more, to want to know who did it, or why. It was just a story about miserable people justifying the unethical things they do, like begging people for money just to squander it on a gambling addiction, like pretending that your daughter is your whole world but doing the bare minimum to provide for her, like stealing from your employer because your roommate has manipulated you into thinking that they’re strapped for cash (and they are because they keep gambling it away). There’s so much deceit and manipulation through the entire book, and you might think that the lies and drama would make for a book that you can’t put down, but a page-turner it is not.

Advice: I wanted to write a longer a review, I mean a couple paragraphs? It’s not much. But this book isn’t it for me. It’s boring, it’s slow moving, it doesn’t hit you the way a nordic noir does, with grit and intensity and a need to keep reading. If that’s what you’re after, there are a plethora of amazing nordic noirs out there, I’d chose from any of them before I’d read anything further from Edvardsson.

The Salt Grows Heavy Review

Book: The Salt Grows Heavy
Author: Cassandra Khaw
Publisher: Nightfire – Tor Publishing Group
Year: 2023
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Synopsis: “Certain stories are recounted so many times that they becomes parched of meaning. Others, however, are kept from wine-warmed conversations, catalogued but rarely recited. Complicated stories with no easy ending, stories that remind us karmic debt is a contrivance of despair, that there is nothing fear or sweet about this world. This is one of those stories.”

Review: I almost didn’t write this review. I read the book, I was enthralled, I was mesmerized, I was horrified, and then I was disappointed. I put The Salt Grows Heavy down, fully intending to walk away from it without reviewing it, but something about it kept pulling me back. I had to review it. I had to give it the space to be seen. Be forewarned, this one is odd; perhaps in the best possible ways, perhaps in the worst.

Khaw, in her letter to the reader, explains that TSGH was birthed from the question “what would happen if Ariel laid eggs?” and that’s possibly all you need to know before diving into this one. It’s short, a quick read, but it delves into themes of body horror, bodily autonomy, and existential dread. This novella is graphic, pointed, and poetic. I stopped short of giving it five full stars because of the disappointment I felt over the ending, but we’ll get into that. It is masterfully written with Khaw driving the plot forward, never mincing words, never adding detail that didn’t serve a purpose, all the while turning a disney fairytale into a twisted brothers Grimm tale.

The Salt Grows Heavy begins with a mermaid-eque creature leaving the kingdom she calls home, though it is notably not her home, after her clutch of daughters hatch from their eggs, eat the king, and subsequently eat the entire kingdom (sparing a precious few). Unable to speak because of an injury incurred by the Prince, as many Grimm and folktales go, we find the protagonist-mermaid leaving the kingdom with the Prince’s plague doctor, one of the only remaining survivors of the hatchling’s apocalypse, uncertain of where she’s headed. As they leave together, they burn the entire kingdom to ash, the plague doctor remarking “What’s the point of revenge if you can’t enjoy it?”.

Spoilers Ahead

As the unlikely pair leaves together, they get no further than a strange, cobbled together village of wildlings, children who systematically and routinely kill each other for sport, only to be rebuilt and recreated by their saints – a trio of physicians who have mastered the art of bringing creatures back from the dead…seemingly. The mermaid and the plague doctor are both horrified, though we come to learn that this horror stems from two distinct places. From the mermaid, she seeks to prove the physicians wrong; having had her own tongue cut out of her mouth by the Prince, her teeth removed, and her sisters slain, she feels a sense of purpose amongst these “saints” and the children they seek to rebuild over and over again. However, the plague doctor, who until this point has never removed his mask, experiences horror for other reasons entirely. As they and the mermaid grow closer, we are offered a glimpse behind the mask only to find that the entirety of the plague doctor’s body has been stitched back together, unable to die, unable to discern any form of gender, a blending of hundreds of parts. In fact, they were the saint’s first project.

The Plague doctor begs the mermaid to allow them to stay behind, to bring wrath upon the saints, and to free the children from their menacing grasp. As this is not a long book, these events happen quickly and before long the mermaid and the plague doctor are discovered by the saints, tracked and attempted to be killed. We come to realize that the mermaid is much heartier than the mermaids of Walt Disney’s imagination and can regenerate nearly at will. The plague doctor, because of their many differing parts, is almost unable to be killed, but they are, after all, still human. As the plague doctor reaches the end of their life, they once more beg the mermaid to allow them to die – to attain the one thing the saints have kept from them for a completely unknown number of years, iterations, and science projects that have kept them alive and uncertain of who they are.

The mermaid allows the plague doctor to die, she kills the saints, and then in epilogue, she resurrects the plague doctor because she’s in love with them. And this. THIS is where I take issue. In a book that is entirely about bodily autonomy, how these creatures have had zero say over their bodies and minds for lifetimes, Khaw chooses to posit that love is more important. She distorts the message of the book, completely does away with the autonomy of the plague doctor, a character who has been (pun not intended) plagued by rebirths and regenerations for so many lifetimes that they cease to understand who they are at all, for the sake of love. I think Khaw misses the mark when it comes to the execution of this book. In her letter to the reader she says, “It’s my love letter to the people who can’t and won’t give up. Who love the end of days. Who love like it is the end of days, and there’s nothing left to lose. It’s my nod to love that comes when you’ve given up, when you’ve concluded that’s it, there’s nothing left.” Personally, I don’t find this book to meet that thesis at all. I think Khaw has written a masterful book full of hard hitting and timely messages, and she throws it all away at the end for the sake of selfish love that cannot allow someone the autonomy to choose to die.

Advice: If you’re looking for a body horror book, this is it. If you like something to move at a quick pace, not take too many pages, and still hit hard, this is it! If, however, you cannot help but analyze a book, see where it went wrong, and find frustration over it, I suspect you’ll find, like I did, that this is not it. If you don’t enjoy gore or graphic violence, this will probably be one you’ll want to skip.