Book Review

The Absinthe Underground Review

Book: The Absinthe Underground
Author: Jamie Pacton
Publisher: Peachtree Teen
Year: 2024
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “For Sybil Clarion, the Belle Epoque city of Severon is a wild, romantic dream, filled with cares, cabarets, and glittering nightclubs. Eager to embrace the city’s freedom after running away from home, she’s traded high-society soirees for empty pockets and barren cabinets. At least she has Esme, the girl who offered Sybil a home, and maybe – if either of them dared – something more.
Ever since Esme Rimbaud brought Sybil back to her flat, the girls have been everything to each other – best friends, found family, and secret crushes. While Esme would rather spend the night tinkering with her clocks and snuggling her cats, Sybil craves excitement and needs money. She plans to get both by stealing the rare posters the crop up around town and selling them to collectors. With rent due, Esme agrees to accompany – and more importantly protect – Sybil.
When they’re caught selling a power by none other that its subject, Maeve, the glamorous girl doesn’t press charges. Rather, she invites Sybil and Esme to the Absinthe Underground, the exclusive club she co-owns, and reveals herself to be a green fairy, trapped in this world. She wants to hire thieves for a daring heist in Fae that would set her free, and is willing to pay enough that Sybil and Esme never have to worry about rent again. It’s too good of an offer to pass up, even if Maeve’s tragic story doesn’t quite add up, and even if Sybil’s personal ties to Fae could jeopardize everything she and Esme have so carefully built.”

Review : The Absinthe Underground is a sweet and fun adventure, that, while not low stakes, somehow ended up feeling just low stakes enough that it didn’t trigger any anxiety while reading it. Pacton crafted a beautiful scene by introducing us to the world of Fae, showing us rather than telling us what an intoxicating other-world might look like to two girls from this world. However, where she did a fantasy world justice, I felt she let the reader down with her depictions of the city of Severon. With a name like Severon and very little explanation to the time frame of the book, I was at first convinced this story was not only fantasy but science fiction. It wasn’t until I read the author’s note (at the end, after finishing the book in it’s entirety) that I realized Severon was meant to be an 1890’s Parisian equivalent. Something got lost in translation, figuratively speaking.

Likewise, Pacton included real world names like Toulouse and Mucha when discussing poster artists whose work is often stolen for it’s one of a kind collector status, which lent a bit of confusion and complication that felt unnecessary to the story. Sybil and Esme live in the top of a clock tower in a made up city that contains real world artists, something that I have a hard time wrapping my mind around when it comes to necessity. Not enough of the pre-Fae exploration of TAU connected me to Paris in the late 1800s for the real world examples to make sense, Pacton could have made a more significant impact on the story by placing greater emphasis on the time frame and reality of the world Sybil and Esme live in, then trying to tie it to our world. She lost me there. 

Spoilers Below

That aside, the Absinthe Underground itself was beautifully described and the subsequent adventure Sybil and Esme embark upon is quite endearing. I did feel, though, that there were several loose ends Pacton left untied; it’s unclear whether they were left untied for a reason or because they were simply overlooked in the editing process. However, one seemingly purposeful loose end does find Sybil and Esme’s adventure into Fae and back into the real world marred by a broken promise to free a human they encountered in Fae and help her find her way back through the door – I find the prospect of another book exciting, I can’t wait to see what Pacton does next! She left several threads throughout the story, dropped like leaves, and I wonder if she’ll pick the all back up in the upcoming book or if we’re simply left to speculate why a forest hag might be frightened of a kitten, whether Sybil’s father was a magician, and why he tried so hard to marry her off and turn her into a “proper” young woman before she ran away. There were small explanations planted throughout the book, but not enough to satisfy the weight each of the aforementioned interactions had on the plot. 

TAU was a cute, low-ish stakes middle grade adventure book that has great potential for future iterations, I think there’s room for improvement, but that improvement could surely come in additional books. Overall, I found it easy to read and enjoyable, if not a little slow and sleepy at times.

Advice : If a low-stakes adventure through a fairy realm sounds up your alley, you’ll want to give this one a read when it debuts in February. If you like a bit of a nail biter or a faster paced adventure, this might not be your jam.

The Fury Review

Book: The Fury
Author: Alex Michaelides
Publisher: Celadon
Year: 2023
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “This is a tale of murder. Or maybe that’s not quite true. At it’s heart, it’s a love story, isn’t it?
Lana Farrar is a reclusive ex-movie star and one of the most famous women in the world. Every year, she invites her closet friends to escape the English weather and spend Easter on her idyllic private Greek island.
I tell you this because you may think you know this story. You probably read about it at the time – it caused a real stir in the tabloids, if you remember. It had all of the necessary ingredients for a press sensation: a celebrity, a private island cut off by the wind…and a murder.
We found ourselves trapped there overnight. Our old friendships concealed hatred and a desire for revenge. What followed was a game of cat and mouse – a battle of wits, full of twists and turns, building to an unforgettable climax. The night ended in violence and death.
But who am I?
My name is Elliot Chase, and I’m going to tell you a story nine any you’ve ever heard.”

Review : When I requested an ARC of The Fury, I didn’t realize it was by an author whose work I’d previously reviewed before. If you’ve been here for a while, you may remember when I reviewed The Maidens and gave it a withering 2 out of 5 stars (though I don’t check GoodReads for reviews, I know several others who read and disliked the execution of The Maidens), The Fury was written by none other than Maidens author, Alex Michaelides. Now, we already know I serve some hot takes on this blog, which is largely why I choose not to check other reviewers opinions prior to writing my own, but I was fairly astonished to find that The Maidens has been optioned into a television series by Mirimax. Small rant aside, I was grateful to get into a new book after trudging through my last review copy, and while The Fury didn’t garner more than 2.5 stars, in my opinion, it was at least a compelling read.

A few things right off the bat really started to rub me the wrong way, contributing at least in part to my 50% positive review. First of all, The Fury is narrated by a singular character who I found immediately off-putting. It’s possible that was Michaelides intention, but given the number of twists and turns throughout the book and the sheer effort he took to convince the reader that the narrator, Elliot, was someone they should be sympathetic to, leads me to believe that it wasn’t at all. Elliot is instantly pretentious and annoying, someone I had zero interest in reading through the eyes of for an entire book, which was unfortunate given that he was exactly who we’d spend the entire book reading through. Rather than laying out exactly who each character in the story was, what their relationship might have been, and allowing us to simply come to the conclusion that Elliot was an unreliable narrator, he began almost immediately by interjecting his own telling of the story to make cheeky comments about how much he’d tried to keep his own opinions out of the story but obviously hadn’t. There’s no room for the reader to do any work, Elliot does it all for us. Rather than reading and inferring, assuming the reader will be smart enough to come to their own conclusions, Michaelides treats us like we’re too dumb to read critically and tells us what’s going on. Personally, I take offense to this style and find it pandering at best, patronizing at worst.

The Fury, set on a remote Greek island, centers around Elliot’s friend and so-called soul mate of a friend, Lana Farrar. Through a series of twists and turns, Elliot convinces Lana to confront both her husband and best friend when she finds out they’ve been having an affair. What happens when she does, however, is a twisted nightmare of toxic relationships, bad choices, and manipulation. However, as we read through the book, we come to find that we’re getting only a fraction of the story from Elliot, revealing only tidbits of information to lead the reader down a path of his own design – which, had it been executed well, would have been intriguing and maybe even exciting to read. However, like I mentioned before, Elliot tells us right from the beginning that he’s an unreliable narrator and it was within the first chapter that I had already solved the murder.

Spoilers Ahead

The question, though, is which murder did I solve? Because this damn book has so many plot twists – arguably TOO many – that it isn’t until we reach the end that we find out who really died and who really murdered them. But, good news for me, the murder I solved in chapter one was, in fact, both the correct murder and correct murderer. Bad news for Michaelides.

When it comes to a murder mystery, or a murder retelling I suppose, in this case, I don’t want plot twist after plot twist after plot twist. I want a singular twist that I can’t see coming from a mile away. I feel so strongly that had Michaelides trusted us as an audience, I would not have seen the murderer coming from the jump. It would have been more interesting, better executed, and a surprise to read. Instead, it became contrived and boring. Michaelides had an infuriating habit of leaving each chapter on an ambiguous teaser, which I don’t mind if done appropriately and sparingly, but when you end every. single. chapter. with words like “He was just a kid, playing make-believe. And kids shouldn’t play with guns.” (59) it not only loses its impact but it loses its appeal. There were so many reasons for me to genuinely dislike this book, it’s hard to cram them all into a single review, but I think I’ve covered the most grievous here. It was compelling, I’ll give Michaelides that much, I kept turning pages, but it was a poor book. And for that I give it 2.5 out of 5 stars.

Advice : Sigh. I suppose if you enjoyed The Maidens you might actually enjoy The Fury. If, however, you don’t enjoy being patronized or a mystery you can solve from the very beginning, I don’t think this will be the one for you. It’s probably worth checking out from the library if you’re curious about it, but by no means should you waste money on this one.

The Queen of Days Review

Book: The Queen of Days
Author: Greta Kelly
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Year: 2023
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “For Balthazar and his family of thieves, stealing a statue during the annual celebration of the god Karan’s was just a good bit of fun…or a way to stick it to the governor who murdered his parents. And yeah, the small fortune in reward doesn’t hurt – even if his boss also hired the mysterious Queen of Days to join the crew as “the weapon of last resort…”
Whatever that means.
But Bal doesn’t know the ceremony isn’t simply the empty words and dusty tradition; it’s true magic. The kind of magic that rips open a portal for the god himself. Only the idol that Karan’s planned on using for a body now lies broken at the Queen of Days’ feet. And half of it is missing.
With the aid of a lovable brawler, a society lady turned bomb maker, a disgraced soldier, and a time-eating demon, Bal must hunt down the missing half of the statue if he has any hope of earning his money, keeping his crew alive…and perhaps even saving all of humanity. But as his journey sends him racing through the city – and across realities – he discovers that doing all this might just doom the city.

The city be damned. It’s time to kill a god.”

Review : The Queen of Days bounces between two points of view; Balthazar (Bal), the leader of a crew of thieves called the Talion gang; and Tassel Janae (Tass), aka The Queen of Days. Bal and his crew have been commissioned by a mysterious patron for what’s supposed to be a simple smash and grab at a largely symbolic ceremony of ruling class elites within Bal’s home city of Cothis. We learn early on that Bal and the members of the Talion gang are not only related to each other, some through illegitimate affairs on Bal’s father’s behalf, but were once the children of the previous ruling elite of Cothis themselves – before Bal’s family was ousted (and killed) by the members of the city for a superstitious belief that they had angered the god of water, Karanis. Several years of drought will do that.

Though the Talion gang are a crew of experienced thieves with years of work under their belts, their patron has a singular request : they must hire and work with the Queen of Days, a masked mercenary with a reputation that precedes her. She’s rumored to be able to defy the laws of nature, to have extraordinary powers, and worst of all, to be a demon of the Nethersphere. She comes to the Talion gang rather mysteriously herself, all but proving the rumors true and creating fear and suspicion within the gang, particularly when she asks for payment in days off their lives rather than in coin. As Bal, Tass, and the rest of the crew work to layout a plan, they become increasingly fractured and disorganized and it takes the remainder of the book to bring them back together into a family unity again.

Spoilers Ahead

As the crew attempts their simple robbery (with a huge payout, mind you), they almost immediately come to find it isn’t quite as simple as they were promised. When the symbolic ceremony turns anything but, Tass takes matters into her own hands and smashes the statuette they were commissioned to steal. Realizing that the ceremony was designed to draw down the god Karanis from the Nethersphere, Tass acts without explanation, saving the youngest member of the Talion gang, Bal’s sister Mira, and escaping the ceremony. When Karanis arrives and finds his vessel destroyed, he takes possession of the current city’s ruler (and Bal’s father’s usurper) Paasch – a move that will not allow Karanis to exist within this world for long. He must find the statue, it must be restored, or he will wreak unstable and unmeasurable damage upon the world. What ensues is about 300 pages of Bal, Tass, and the crew working to figure out what’s really going on, where the pieces of the statue may have ended up, and how they can save themselves in the process.

I chose to give TQOD 3 stars because I found this book to be quite long and difficult to get through. I don’t actually mind an almost 400 page book, I enjoy a lengthy tale, particularly if it’s something I can’t stop thinking about, but that’s exactly the problem I had with this one. I’ve often said that it doesn’t take quality writing to create a compelling story, there have been many books I’ve found lacking when it came quality that kept me turning pages simply because I couldn’t stop thinking about what was going to happen. Unfortunately, TQOD didn’t hit the mark for me. I found myself distinctly disconnected from the characters, I would put the book down and easily walk away, I found myself thinking of other things when I was reading and often had to go back and reread passages in order to figure out what was happening because I was so lacking connection. There were about 100 pages right at the end that found me turning pages to see what was going to happen, but sadly the 200 something pages that preceded it were so uninteresting enough that the final 100 weren’t enough to make me want to give this book a higher rating.

I will say, it was written quite well and utilized a trope many people thoroughly enjoy : found family. I found the world building to be fair, but not great, as I had a lot of unanswered questions about the world Kelly created. It didn’t help that I was so disconnected from the story, I think had I found more connection with the characters I might have found more connection with the world, but there still remain many unanswered questions about the world, what it looks like, and how it interacts with the characters, and why it does the way it does – for example, Kelly mentions a flood mythology that exists within this world, much like exists within our world. I have questions. Fortunately for readers, TQOD is very clearly the first of at least two books so there will be time and room for questions to be answered, but that does rely on readers finding their own connections that will compel them to continue reading, and of that I’m not sure they will.

Advice : If you enjoy fantasy, the found family trope, and don’t mind reading several hundred pages, you just might like this one. I personally found it lengthy and difficult to get through, but if you like a series, enjoy thievery and magic and gods who aren’t really gods, I think this would be worth the time.

The Shape of Time Review

Book: The Shape of Time
Author: Ryan Calejo
Publisher: Amulet Books
Year: 2023
Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

Synopsis: “Antares de la Vega is an adventurer at heart. He dreams of journeying across burning deserts, trekking through wild and uncharted jungles, sailing the farthest reaches of the seas – and yet, he’s never stepped foot outside of South Florida.
Until strange creatures come leaping out of lightning bolts to kidnap him.
Locked away in a secret prison in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle, Antares meets Magdavellia, a mysterious and iron-willed girl who opens his eyes to a shocking truth: This world is a far different – and weirder – place than he’s been led to believe. Every stranger rumor, every wild theory, is based on truth.
After they escape the prison, Antares and Magdavellia must set out beyond the edges of any amp in search of a legendary artifact – and Antares’s parents, who have been missing most of his life. The two of them must wield geometry and alchemy, outsmart molten and mermaids, and outrun fiendish aliens…all while attempting to solve a riddle as old and mystifying as the sun.

Review: Okay, let’s address the elephant in the room, shall we? I’ve never given a book anything lower than 2 out of 5 stars and here I am, bypassing an entire half star to give this book a lone 1 out of 5 stars. You’re right, it’s drastic; particularly as I’ve been reading and reviewing more and more standout books over the last year. But it’s necessary. Trust me.

The Shape of Time (TSOT) is a middle grade read with a 14-year-old main character – based on how it’s written, I suspect this book would do best with those 10-12 years old. Never in my life did I think I would be reviewing a flat earth conspiracy mid grade read, but here we are. I cannot defend it, teaching middle schoolers that the earth might be flat (albeit in a science fiction book / fantasy book) in a world where conspiracy theories freely abound, feels at best irresponsible and at worst dangerous. I was worried as I began this book and realized what direction we were headed in that a thrilling adventure book geared toward young to mid grade readers would create a space where growing minds might not be able to differentiate between fact and fiction, particularly when fiction exists so prolifically outside the world of books – but my fears were in vain, as this book is not the thrilling adventure I expected it to be.

Maybe this is my fault, for assuming that a book with a synopsis like that would be anything short of thrilling, exciting, or adventurous. In fact, until about four chapters into the book I thought it was really headed in a direction I could see myself enjoying. It starts well – well, actually, it starts by ripping off A Wrinkle in Time with strange characters from another world / time / dimension / part of a flat planet Earth named Mr. Now, Mr. Minutes, and Mr. Hoursback (though, why Mr. Minutes is called Mr. Minutes when he comes from a part of the Earth that calls Minutes Mintocks is beyond me). There are so many discrenpancies like what I mentioned above that it began to feel overwhelming keeping track of them all, but I want to point out specifically the differences between Calejo’s descriptions of the world he crafted for us and the illustrations not only within the book but on the cover as well. Antares is described as having one blue eye and one brown, but on the cover of the book, praised by Calejo in his acknowledgements, Antares has two brown eyes. Calejo describes monsters and vessels and the world around us in TSOT but the illustrations never line up with what we’ve read – the disconnect is hard to get past and kept me from creating a world in my mind. It does a huge disservice to the book, but quite honestly, it’s Calejo’s poor writing and inability to craft a world I either care about or care to even visualize that are the real disservice here.

I had a hard time getting into this one, likely from the immediate A Wrinkle in Time reference, but once I did, I enjoyed a mere two chapters before I found myself annoyed and ready to be done. I sincerely wanted to put this one down before I finished it, but I found the things that frustrated me about this book were so egregious that I had to write a review. I find it interesting that a quick google search for this book turns up, first not this book, because it’s a common name and there are other, better things out there; second, not a single review of it despite it’s September publish date. I find that to be a good sign. Calejo boasts several awards, “half a dozen state reading lists”, and medals for his writing prowess, yet I find TSOT to be, to put it bluntly, aggressively bad.

Advice: Avoid. Trust me. Avoid at all costs. It’s not worth the time or energy.

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.

Camp Damascus Review

Book: Camp Damascus
Author: Chuck Tingle
Publisher: Nightmare
Year: 2023
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “Welcome to Everton, Montana: home to a God-fearing community with a heart of gold.

Nestled high up in the mountains is Camp Damascus, the self-proclaimed “most effective” gay conversion camp in the country. Here, a life free from sin awaits. But the secret behind that success is anything but holy.”

Review : I’ve been a little hesitant to review Camp Damascus because, well, I didn’t like it very much. Structurally, I couldn’t find much fault with it, even for a review copy. There were few errors and the narrative flowed well enough, at least for a middle grade read, which I don’t necessarily find this to be, but it was written that way, so it appears it may be. I’ve struggled with how to review this book knowing that it isn’t bad, but also feeling strongly that it doesn’t move the cultural narrative forward or do any work to provide any kind of cultural healing. Maybe that’s too much to put onto a book, frankly it’s what’s kept me from being able to concisely put my words onto the page, maybe I’m asking too much of a book like this. But Tingle himself said something in the note to the reader that makes me think that maybe it isn’t too much, maybe it’s just enough : “Currently, there are conversion therapy camps working hard to strip the personalities and inner truths from thousands of queer youths. These camps see one’s identity as something that can be ground down and chiseled away, creating a new and improved version of something that was never broken to being with. This barbaric attempt to crush the glorious reality of young LGBTQ people needs to end. It’s my hope that Camp Damascus can be a voice in the choir of artists and writers standing up to shout “no more”.”

Camp Damascus follows a 20-year-old autistic girl named Rose as she begins to unravel her known reality, living within the confines of a small town whose population largely attends church who hosts what’s known as the nation’s most effective conversion camp, boasting a 100% success rate. Early on, Rose notes that the commercials for Camp Damascus don’t have a need to hire actors because of their extremely high success rate, however no one that she knows who she’s spotted in the commercials have any recollection of having ever being participants at Camp Damascus. Tingle weaves a web of confusion and strangeness right out of the gate, creating a book that is immediately a horror novel, with Rose vomiting up piles of strange mayfly type bugs, witnessing a horrifying visage anytime she begins to feel anything that may resemble same-sex attraction (though this connection isn’t made clear to Rose until part-way through the book), and some bizarre breaks in reality where she remembers things as being other than they are.

Rose begins to tug at the thread of strangeness, unraveling the world around her, and in doing so she begins to lose her faith. As the object of her affection is murdered by what she grows to learn is a demon and her reality becomes more and more skewed, Camp Damascus becomes more and more of a supernatural horror / thriller. Rose grows to learn that she was, in fact, a former conversion therapy camp attendee, having had a previous relationship with another girl named Willow, but having little to no recollection of the relationship and absolutely no memory of attending the camp. Because she’s driven by the need to know more and more information, to structure her world into a way that makes sense, Rose is able to begin to parse what’s happening and methodically works her way through people who’ve been to Camp Damascus before, hoping to understand why they’re all witnessing demons and barfing up flies. Rose finds solace in a friend from camp (though she doesn’t remember him), Saul, and together they plot to take down Camp Damascus and help save those who’ve been through the program and have subsequently lost their memories and found themselves tethered to a demon.

The point of the demonic tethering in Camp Damascus is to bring about something truly terrifying and out of alignment with reality anytime the tethered human experiences any form of same-sex attraction, pushing them to avoid the feeling or avoid the person who has lead them to “sin”. While the concept is true of conversion therapy, the execution is obviously made-up, but it is in this execution that I find the biggest flaws with the book. Tingle is attempting to draw a parallel to the fear that Christianity uses to convert, “fire insurance” if you will, by using literal demons in his book as a means of fear based conversion. In Rose’s research, though, she’s able to determine that the Demons are real beings from another, perhaps alternate, world. They can walk through walls and disappear at will, but they are flesh and blood like people. She gets a glimpse at real deal hell, as well, and is able to see exactly how the demons torture humans who sin. It’s here that I take the most issue. Rose loses her faith because she finds what the church is doing to be completely out of alignment with the idea of love and salvation, but the prospect of real hell continues to exist for her. I think by continuing to draw lines to the idea of fear through hell being a real place really does a disservice to what Tingle and other authors are clearly trying to do. If Christians are using fear to convert and fear to turn anyone who identifies as other into their perfect idea of a “sinless” human, then Tingle is no different by (spoilers ahead) having the demons drag bigoted church members to literal hell in the end of the book.

While I believe Tingle is making a point to show that being gay isn’t a sin, by allowing for hell to be a real place and for the demons to really be torturing humans who sin, his work no longer moves the cultural narrative forward. I believe that Tingle’s book comes from a place of anger, and rightfully so, particularly as a member of the LGBTQ community. Tingle has every right to be angry. He even has every right to write a book out of that anger. BUT if Tingle wants to join the growing chorus of voices saying “no more” then I think the chorus of voices needs to create spaces for forward movement and instead what he’s done is create a space of convoluted anger and continued fear that by acting certain ways we’ll be dragged to hell and tortured for eternity. I think this book missed the mark in terms of saying “no more” and bringing spaces of healing and momentum toward something different and better into the world. Rather, Tingle perpetuated the idea of a literal Christian hell and continued to create spaces of fear and fear-based conversion (though, not conversion in the conversion camp sense), and to me that makes this book disappointing and sad, no different than movies that perpetuate the fear we have over war and disease during times of war and disease. I think collectively we need spaces where we can grapple with what cultural reality looks like, but (and this is coming from someone who has not been through conversion camp, so take my opinion with a grain of salt) I don’t think this was quite it.

Advice : If you like horror, particularly supernatural horror, you will probably find this fairly enjoyable. If you have any form of religious trauma or trauma surrounding conversion therapy, I would steer clear of this one. Although, it’s possible you may find it cathartic – but I think there are definite themes that would be potentially triggering to those with PTSD, so bear that in mind. It was a miss for me, but if you love horror it may be a hit for you.

The Angel Maker Review

Book: The Angel Maker
Author: Alex North
Publisher: Celadon Books
Year: 2023
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “Growing up in a beautiful house in the English countryside, Katie Shaw lived a charmed life. At the cusp of graduation, she had big dreams, a devoted boyfriend, and a little brother she protected fiercely. Until the day a violent stranger changed the fate of her family forever.

Years later, still unable to live down the guilt surrounding what happened to her brother, Chris, and now with a child of her own to protect, Katie struggles to separate the real threats from the imagined. But then she gets the phone call: Chris has gone missing and needs his big sister once more.

Meanwhile, Detective Laurence Age is facing a particularly gruesome crime. A distinguished professor of fate and free will has been brutally murdered just hours after firing his staff. All the leads point back to two old cases: the gruesome attack on teenager Christopher Shaw, and the despicable crimes of a notorious serial killer who, legend had it, could see the future.”

Review : Why is it that the books that come with the coolest ARC packaging always turn out to be the biggest duds? The Angel Maker arrived with several envelopes, each with a sticker dictating after which chapter you should open each. Inside the envelopes were cute little references to the revelations in each corresponding chapter: a small card, a newspaper article, and a box of matches. I love getting ARC packages, they are always an extremely enjoyable aspect of receiving and reviewing books, but what I’ve come to notice is that if a book has a detailed and intricate package, it’s likely to be pretty rough reading.

The Angel Maker did not disappoint in terms of living up to the ARC package let-down. North, a former New York Times best seller, wrote a book with a unique story in a truly bizarre way. I found myself wondering several times if he had simply hit “replace all” for certain words, given the strange wording of so many of his sentences. There were many instances of sentences that seemed to go nowhere, that wove a strange web of words that didn’t go together, it felt almost as if it had been poorly translated into English. I found myself baffled more than not reading through this one – and I realize it’s an uncorrected proof so it’s probably pretty likely that by the time it’s available to buy these problems will have been corrected, but I think it speaks volumes when an ARC reads so poorly.

I will give North credit, though, the story he’s created is interesting and strange. It unravels at the speed you’d hope from a suspense/thriller novel. Told from the point of view of several people, it hops between the present and the past, unveiling more and more details as you read. Something North did that I didn’t enjoy, however, was relying on the unreliable female narrator trope – once again we see a female protagonist, Katie Shaw, who’s had two whole glasses of wine and suddenly no one around her can possibly believe a word she says, so what does she do? Investigates on her own, of course! What else could she possibly do? This is the trope. It’s old, it’s over done, it’s worn out, and it’s lazy. And I’m not exaggerating, she had two glasses of wine in one single scene and suddenly her husband no longer believes a word she’s saying. But let’s not even focus on the fact that her husband regularly leaves their five year old daughter alone to watch tv by herself while he makes music in the basement with the door closed, a fact that Katie finds bothersome and irritating while her husband, Sam, finds completely acceptable.

I find it hard to want to read a book that employs the aforementioned trope, particularly as a woman. Not only is it overdone, but it plays into a stereotype that honestly isn’t a good look coming from yet another male author. I was slow to read The Angel Maker for all of the above reasons, it took me longer than most of the ARCs I’ve read this year because, while the story was interesting, it was written so poorly and in such a lazy way that it was no longer even a compelling read. It’s unfortunate that an author can take a quality premise and mess it up so badly that it isn’t even worth turning pages to see the finale. I’ve said many times that a book doesn’t have to be well written to be compelling, and unfortunately The Angel Maker is neither well written nor compelling.

Advice: Unless Alex North is your favorite author, this is a pass for me. It contains depictions of attempted and successful murder, snuff films, houselessness, substance abuse, and gaslighting. If you enjoy a book with worn out tropes, you might actually like this one. If you don’t, this isn’t it.

Into the Light Review

Book: Into the Light
Author: Mark Oshiro
Publisher: Tor Teen
Year: 2023
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis: “It’s been one year since Manny was cast out of his family and driven into the wilderness of the American Southwest. Since then, Manny lives by self-taught rules that keep him moving – and keep him alive. Now, he’s taking a chance on a traveling situation with the Varela family, whose attractive but surly son, Carlos, seems to promise a new future.

Eli abides by the rules of his family, living in a secluded community that raised him to believe his obedience will be rewarded. But an unsettling question slowly eats away at Eli’s once unwavering faith in Reconciliation: why can’t he remember his past?

But the reported discovery of an unidentified body found in the hills of Idylwild, California, will draw both of these young men into facing their biggest fears and confronting their own identity – and who ethyl are allowed to be.

For fans of Courtney Summers and Tiffany D. Jackson, Into the Light is a ripped-from-the-headlines story with Oshiro’s signature mix of raw emotions and visceral prose…but with a startling twist you’ll have to read to believe.”

Review: In both the ARC pamphlet I received with this book and the author’s note at the end of the book, Oshiro alludes to a childhood trauma that inspired and birthed this book, what I suspect, based on little tidbits throughout Into the Light, was conversion camp. The air of conversion, of being forced to undergo something dangerous, something heartless, and cruel at the hands of the people who should be the most loving and protective forces in your life, runs throughout this book. While it isn’t at all about that type of conversion, it is about the damage that the church causes at the hands of people who have no business holding positions of power.

Into the Light follows Manny, a young adult who grew up with his sister Elena, bouncing from foster home to foster home, seeing the worst of the worst, and finding that as he gets older the likelihood of seeing a real adoption happen grows smaller and smaller. Manny and Elena, however, find themselves being adopted blindly into a family with direct ties to a cult-ish christian community called Christ’s Dominion. The family quickly decides that Manny needs to participate in something called Reconciliation and sends both he and his sister to a three-day “retreat” in the Californian mountains. What Manny experiences at Reconciliation is not quite conversion camp, but it is detrimental, traumatic, and extremely dangerous. He arrives to find that all the families in attendance are white with adoptive children who are not, across the board, most have come directly from other countries, several from within the foster system, and all with something deemed wrong with them – whether that be their gender identity, their sexual preferences, or the color of their skin.

Into the Light is told from Manny’s perspective, jumping from the present, as he lives his life with the newly found Varela family traveling the country trying to find his sister Elena, to the past as he experiences Reconciliation, and yet from a third time period as he (known as Eli, having succeeded in Reconciliation in some ambiguous, nebulous way) lives his life at the compound in the mountains, sharing his success story with newcomers and their “wrong” children. I found this style to be confusing, as the chapters had no headings to tell you what point of view you would be reading – the perspective shift was shown by a slight change in font that got more confusing as the story ramped up and all three perspectives were being shared closer together than they had previously in order to get to the climax of Manny’s journey with Christ’s Dominion. I think some headers would have been a huge help particularly as the book wrapped up, jumping quickly from one perspective to another in order to round out the entirety of the narrative.

My biggest issue with this book is the plot twist at the end, I think it detracted from the weight of the story, took away from the very real issues being discussed in the book, and didn’t serve a function. We read through 90% of the novel as a realistic fiction book, yes quite troubling and pointed, but not a horror novel in that sense. With about 10% of the book remaining, the “truth” is revealed and the book becomes sci-fi or horror in an unrealistic kind of way, which I tend to enjoy but not when it shifts the entirety of the book into a new genre with no time to spare. I felt like there were some many important aspects of this book, so many important things being discussed in a first-person narrative that need to be spoken, that need to have a light shed on them, that when Oshiro changed the book with a strange plot twist that took Manny’s separation from Eli from being explainable as trauma, which he absolutely endured, to being explainable as a sci-fi impossibility it lessoned the weight of what Oshiro was trying to get across. Suddenly we have nothing more than a science fiction book with a weird ending that’s so disjointed from the majority of the book that I don’t know how to reconcile the two, and frankly I think that does a huge disservice to what Oshiro could have achieved.

With a rise in anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation, a rise in christian nationalism, and a rise in spoken hatred, books like Into the Light that share what children are really experiencing at the hands of people who should be doing their best to protect them are incredibly important. I found it disappointing that this book shifted in the way it did, that the twist wasn’t more seamlessly included throughout the rest of the book, and I left it thinking more about how disjointed it was than I did thinking about how realistic the rest of it was for thousands of teens and young adults across the country. Manny’s story, and by proxy, Oshiro’s personal story, deserve to be told and heard and believed with compassion and care and love. I fear that the twist has only served to detract from something so important.

Advice: This book contains depictions of the foster care system, of sexual harassment of a minor, of religious trauma, of conversion, of racism, of parental abandonment, of physical assault, and of very real trauma and ptsd experiences following. It is, however, a great read that moves swiftly and keeps you reading to see what’s going to happen. I think if you like a singular viewpoint told from multiple timeframes, you’ll probably read through this and really enjoy it. If you find that style to be confusing, this might not be the best or easiest book to read. If you have experienced religious trauma or conversion, this may be a pretty intense and difficult read for you as well.

Junkyard Dogs Review

Book: Junkyard Dogs
Author: Katherine Higgs-Coulthard
Publisher: Peachtree Teen
Year: 2023
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis: “Josh’s father has gone missing without a trace. Now Josh and his 9-year-old brother, Twig, are stuck living with Gran in her trailer. Problem is, Gran didn’t ask to take care of any kids, and she’s threatening to call social services unless Josh can find his dad. After paying off his Gran to take in his little brother, Josh risks truancy and getting kicked off his basketball team to take to the streets and hunt for his dad. But when Josh digs too deep, he suddenly finds himself tethered to a liminal scrapping ring that his father was accomplice to. If Josh wants to keep Twig out of the system and return to some sense of normal, he’ll have to track his dad down and demand honest answers.”

Review: Set in a town not all that far from where I’ve lived, Junkyard Dogs feels eerily close to home. Set in South Bend, Indiana, this book tells the story of a pair of brothers experiencing houselessness during a brutal midwest winter. As I was on my way to a coffee shop to write this review, in fact, I passed a billboard that said 7,800 youth and young adults in my town would experience houselessness this year alone. It hits close to home in more ways than one.

Coming from the midwest herself, Higgs-Coulthard hits the nail on the head with her depictions of this part of the country, including how easy it is for many living in a semi-large city to absolutely miss the fact that so many of it’s residents are struggling and just barely scraping by. While this story centers around one particular incident with Josh and Twig, as Josh reminisces about the past with a mother who died when he was young and a father who ran a junkyard during Josh’s formative years, it’s clear that the blurred lines between temporary housing and houselessness are grey at best. This is a liminal space of transience, shifting from a junkyard house on the brink of condemnation by the city to a trailer owned by their Gran to an abandoned warehouse, to tent city under an overpass, to no shelter at all, we see all the ways in which someone without stability grapples to survive in a world that requires a lot of money and connections to get by.

Junkyard Dogs is somewhat infuriating in that as readers we’re privy to all the ways in which the world beats Josh down; from his Gran telling him he’s garbage and worse on a daily basis, to his dad who runs off early on in the book without even leaving Josh with enough money to pay for rent to keep him and his little brother housed at his Gran’s trailer, to the shelter that requires an adult for any minor to eat. It’s hard to read at times.

I think Higgs-Coulthard has created a book that’s deeply human, moving, and gripping; emerging us in a mystery that takes an entire book to unravel completely. While I was able to figure out the central twist pretty early on, I don’t think it ruined the book in any way, and I sort of suspect that Higgs-Coulthard meant for her readers to grasp the twist at least part way through the plot. While this book does end with a pretty neat ending that I think is unlikely to be reality for most unhoused youth, making it pretty unrealistic in my opinion, I did enjoy the way in which she chose to end the story. It isn’t easy, but it’s certainly the best case scenario. I think the book could have been more impactful by being more realistic in it’s ending, but I also think as a young adult read it almost demanded a hopeful ending. It ends by giving us some sense of hope for humanity, hope for the way people experience each other, and hope for the empathy the world might bestow upon people who are down on their luck.

Advice: If you are empathetic at all, this may very well not be a book for you, particularly if you don’t enjoy crying over books. If you enjoy a book with a hopeful ending, with hope for a better future in spite of a tough start, this might be the book for you! If you enjoy stories about real things, about real problems that impact real people, this is probably a great place to start.