The Sunday Post AKA What’s on my (Mostly Virtual) Nightstand 4-30-23

Another Month Ends:

All Targets Met
All Systems Working
All Customers Satisfied
All Staff Eager and Enthusiastic
All Pigs Fed and Ready to Fly

Remember that with enough thrust, pigs CAN fly. So the above is ALL entirely possible. Not terribly likely – at least not all at once – but possible.

I have a poster on my office wall from Graeme Base’s marvelous Animalia. It will not surprise anyone that the poster is “Lazy Lions Lounging in the Local Library”. As a bit of an  homage, here’s a “Lazy Luna Lounging in the Lap of Luxury”

Winner Announcements:

The winner of the Just Because Giveaway Hop is Heather
The winner of the Dancing in the Rain Giveaway Hop is Angela

Blog Recap:

A- Review: The Way of the Bear by Anne Hillerman
B+ Review: Happy Place by Emily Henry
A- Review: The Comeback Cowboy by Jackie Ashenden, Caitlin Crews, Nicole Helm, Maisey Yates
B Review: The Beach Reads Bookshop by Lee Tobin McClain
A- Review: The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw
Stacking the Shelves (546)

Coming This Week:

Come What May Giveaway Hop
The Bride Wore White by Amanda Quick (blog tour review)
Tsalmoth by Steven Brust (review)
Life’s a Beach Giveaway Hop
For Love of Magic by Simon R. Green (review)

Stacking the Shelves (546)

LOTS of pretty covers this week! All in the S’s and all in the blues, Shorefall, The Square of Sevens and Starling House. Although Starling House is also just a bit creepy looking. But probably not as actually creepy as yesterday’s book, The Salt Grows Heavy. Which was excellent but pretty much broke my creep-o-meter for a while.

Audible had a 2-for-1 sale, and those are always my downfall, plus The Fossil Hunter was the Audible Daily Deal one day this week. If you’re not signed up for the Audible Daily Deal daily email, and you’re willing to be tempted by excellent audiobooks going for a song, it’s definitely worth the minute or two it takes every day just to check out what’s on sale that day.

For Review:
Colorful Palate by Raj Tawney
Famous in a Small Town by Viola Shipman
Long Past Dues (Unorthodox Chronicles #2) by James J. Butcher
The Navigating Fox by Christopher Rowe
The Never Wars by David Pedreira
Of Time and Turtles by Sy Montgomery
Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond
A Power Unbound (Last Binding #3) by Freya Marske
The Square of Sevens by Laura Shepherd-Robinson
Starling House by Alix E. Harrow
A Stranger in the Citadel by Tobias Buckell (book AND audio)
Technically Yours by Denise Williams

Purchased from Amazon/Audible/Etc.:
The Empire’s Ruin (Ashes of the Unhewn Throne #1) by Brian Staveley (audio)
For Love of Magic by Simon R. Green
The Fossil Hunter by Tea Cooper (audio)
Postcards from Stella Maris (Liz Talbot) by Susan M. Boyer
Shorefall (Founders #2) by Robert Jackson Bennett


If you want to find out more about Stacking The Shelves, please visit the official launch page

Please link your STS post in the linky below:

Review: The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw

Review: The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra KhawThe Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw
Narrator: Susan Dalian
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, horror
Pages: 112
Length: 2 hours and 54 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Nightfire on May 2, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

From USA Today bestselling author Cassandra Khaw comes The Salt Grows Heavy, a razor-sharp and bewitching fairytale of discovering the darkness in the world, and the darkness within oneself.
You may think you know how the fairytale goes: a mermaid comes to shore and weds the prince. But what the fables forget is that mermaids have teeth. And now, her daughters have devoured the kingdom and burned it to ashes.
On the run, the mermaid is joined by a mysterious plague doctor with a darkness of their own. Deep in the eerie, snow-crusted forest, the pair stumble upon a village of ageless children who thirst for blood, and the three 'saints' who control them.
The mermaid and her doctor must embrace the cruellest parts of their true nature if they hope to survive.

My Review:

Three different stories, all irreparably skewered and vivisected, are stitched together to make one bloody, creepy, startling ode of a horror story in The Salt Grows Heavy. But as haunting and compelling as the story is, I didn’t pick this up for its story.

Because what makes this tale stick in the mind and the ribs and the craw isn’t the story nearly as much as it is the soaring, lyrical language in which it is told.

After repeated Disney incarnations, in the popular imagination The Little Mermaid is a romance with a happy ending, even though the original Hans Christian Andersen version was a lot more equivocal.

The Salt Grows Heavy takes that romantic tale and sieves it through a much gorier and grimmer lens – much like the original, unexpurgated Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Then it strips the skin from the story’s bones and makes it a whole lot bloodier.

This so-called mermaid did not leave the sea for love of any prince. She was captured by a rapacious king who kept her as his literal trophy wife through sorcery and brutality. When we first meet her, she has already had her revenge for decades of rape and torment. Her daughters, just as much monsters as their mother, have killed and eaten the entire kingdom.

Paul Fürst, engraving (coloured), c. 1656, of a plague doctor of Marseilles (introduced as ‘Dr Beaky of Rome’). His nose-case is filled with herbal material to keep off the plague.

She decides to leave those bones to her daughters, and set out on a journey. After all, the marrow has literally been sucked out of her revenge. But she does not travel alone. One brave or foolish soul, if not a bit of both, volunteers to accompany her. It is ‘her’ Plague Doctor, someone who has secrets of their own, hidden behind their profession’s iconic mask.

So they set off on a journey, two monsters together. For she is most definitely a monster, and the Plague Doctor is a patchwork creature not unlike Frankenstein’s monster, made of bits and pieces of dead things with a mind of their own.

What they find along their way is something that neither of them ever imagined. They find beauty, and love, and nature “red in tooth and claw”, including their own.

But if the Plague Doctor is Frankenstein’s monster, then the doctor himself – or themselves – can’t be far away. With an entirely new – and even more rapacious – pack of monster acolytes to carry out their bloody, gruesome work.

Escape Rating A-: I picked this up because I loved the author’s Nothing But Blackened Teeth, in spite of not being all that much of a horror reader. What I loved about that earlier book was the absolutely unholy lyricality of the language in which the story was told. It was horror as poetry and it captured me from the very first.

Therefore, The Salt Grows Heavy is one of the very rare occasions where I picked a book, not for its story, but for the language in which that story is told; haunting, creepy and beautiful at the same time.

The story combines The Little Mermaid, Frankenstein, and The Lost Boys (both the movie and the original Peter Pan interpretations fit) by sticking them into a blender, bones and all, and watching the blood fountain up as the blades gnaw at their meat.

It wasn’t quite as cohesive a story as Nothing But Blackened Teeth, but as I was listening to it, that didn’t matter AT ALL. I was so caught up in how she was describing EVERYTHING that I couldn’t stop listening – no matter how gorge inducing the scene she was describing might have been.

But I discovered, as I did with Nothing But Blackened Teeth, that the story lost its punch for me when I attempted to finish by reading the text. It wasn’t half so compelling a story in my head as it was when I felt myself inserted into the head of that misnamed mermaid.

So even when we see the even awfuller stuff coming – when she sees it coming – it was her voice that allowed me to let it come and let the experience play out to its bloody, bittersweet end.

The Salt Grows Heavy is a tale to be listened to with rapt attention – with ALL the lights on.

Review: The Beach Reads Bookshop by Lee Tobin McClain

Review: The Beach Reads Bookshop by Lee Tobin McClainThe Beach Reads Bookshop by Lee Tobin McClain
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, relationship fiction, women's fiction
Series: Hometown Brothers #3
Pages: 352
Published by HQN Books on April 25, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Running a bookstore on a quaint Chesapeake island is exactly the life Deena Clark would have chosen for herself--but helping billionaire businessman Luis Dominguez figure out fatherhood is part of the package. Can bonding over books and one little girl help them open their hearts to each other?

My Review:

“When one door closes another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.” At least according to Alexander Graham Bell. But what if, as occurs in – and at – The Beach Reads Bookstore, it’s not the looking forward and back that does you in, but rather looking next to you at the person who needs to walk through that new door with you – and not trusting them well enough – or at all – when it comes to crossing that next threshold with them at your side.

Two doors have shut behind 50something Carol Fisher. She lost her job and her husband on the same day to the same cause, stupidity. Institutional stupidity on the part of the college where she is suddenly no longer employed in the tutoring center – which is slated to go online. Testosterone-induced middle-age midlife crisis stupidity on the part of her soon-to-be ex-husband, who she caught carrying his nurse through the house on the way to some hanky-panky. A piece of stupidity he’s going to pay for in more ways than one, as he’s currently collecting disability that is going to stop the minute his duplicity is revealed.

An entirely different set of doors has closed for Deena Clark. Her best friend and roommate has died, leaving Deena with custody of her friend’s baby girl, who shows signs of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Deena loves Willow, and wants more than anything to be her mother. But she’s also at the end of her rope. She was barely scraping by financially when she was sharing the apartment, but now that she’s on her own and responsible for a baby who needs extra care, she knows that she doesn’t have the resources to get Willow the help she needs. And that’s just not good enough for little Willow.

Deena sees only one option – to take Willow to her sperm donor and hope that the rich entrepreneur will provide the child support he didn’t know he was responsible for. But Luis Dominguez, once he accepts that Willow is incontrovertibly his, has no plans to pay Deena to make the baby and her caregiver go away.

He intends to be Willow’s father – and he’s willing to cajole or connive in order to make that happen. With all the best intentions – because he’s that kind of Type-A steamroller who believes he always knows best.

His plan is to buy the old, dilapidated bookstore on Teaberry Island, the place where he grew up and where his family still lives, and pay Deena an exorbitant amount of money to manage the bookstore and take care of his daughter – with the able and conveniently nearby assistance of his mother, his two brothers and their wives. His plan keeps Deena with him, gives him something to do on Teaberry Island, and most importantly, gives him time to be a real father to his little girl. All he has to do is tear himself away from his high stakes, high pressure, big time consulting firm in DC.

That his plan to open a door for Willow, Deena and himself runs headlong into Carol’s plan to reopen that same dilapidated bookstore that her family still owns isn’t even on his radar – and he wouldn’t care if it was and doesn’t care when he finds out.

But Teaberry Island is a small town, and everybody pitches in to get the bookstore open again under Luis’ plan for Deena. Except for Carol and her new-found friends, who have plans to take things in an entirely different situation.

Let the games begin!

Escape Rating B: At first it seems as if Carol – along with her friends – is being set up as the villain of this story. Which is entirely unfair, as she’s in every bit as big of a mess when the story begins as Deena is.

But the “A” plot in The Beach Reads Bookshop is Deena’s slow-burn romance with Luis and their pretty inevitable shift from being strangers to becoming a family. It’s cute and it’s sweet and they each have some lessons to learn along the way – but where they’re going to end up is obvious from the beginning so it’s not exactly a surprise when they get there.

Carol’s story, that “B” plot, on the other hand, had a few more twists and turns. (It also went into one nasty corner that I’ll get to in a minute). Carol is the character who is doing a lot of that “regretting the closed door” at least at the beginning, that the quote is talking about. It’s not just that she misses her job and is mourning the end of her marriage, but she’s looking back even further, all the way back to when her grandfather owned the bookstore and the world was just a bit different.

But her sister sold the bookstore out from under her before she even knew Carol wanted it. Which is the point where Carol barged into Deena’s life.

At first it’s that long ago nostalgia that Carol is really trying to recapture – no matter how badly she goes about it. And no matter how much trouble it gets her into. It’s only as she embraces the new life she’s creating on Teaberry Island that her situation really gets interesting – even as it nearly takes a sharp left turn into “grand theft bookstore”.

Once she starts looking forward instead of back she realizes what a fantastic opportunity all of the doors that slammed behind her really were. And while it wasn’t a surprise that her soon-to-be-ex tried – badly – to get her back, it was great that she did not let herself get sucked back into that boring, unfulfilled and unsatisfactory life.

That her journey brings her around to a point where she and Deena are running that bookstore together – and enjoying it and each other’s company – brought everything full circle and tied the story up with a pretty – and somewhat unexpected – bow.

Reviewer’s Note: There was one fly in the sweet-smelling potpourri of this story, at least for this reader, that lies in the way the conflict over the bookstore played out. As ironic as this may sound, in the beginning, both Carol and the local librarian indulged in more than a bit of reader-shaming over the idea that the bookstore would focus on light, fluffy, “beach read” type books. There is a debate, even in library circles, over the question of whether libraries should push people to read “better” books, or if it’s just terrific that people are reading and enjoying it no matter what they choose to read. It’s a debate that was resolved long ago in favor of being happy that people are reading and that it is REALLY bad karma to shame people for what they read. So it left a really bad taste in this reader’s – and librarian’s – to see that debate played out in a rather snide fashion in the earlier parts of this book, especially the way the local librarian was reader-shaming her own patrons. Your reading mileage, of course, may vary. But I hope that whatever you read and love, that we all stop trying to shame other readers for their choices. 

Review: The Comeback Cowboy by Jackie Ashenden, Caitlin Crews, Nicole Helm, Maisey Yates

Review: The Comeback Cowboy by Jackie Ashenden, Caitlin Crews, Nicole Helm, Maisey YatesThe Comeback Cowboy by Maisey Yates, Caitlin Crews, Nicole Helm, Jackie Ashenden
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: contemporary romance, western romance
Series: Jasper Creek #4
Pages: 384
Published by HQN Books on April 25, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

They may not have been friends when they were younger but now, they’ll work together to save the camp that saved them and, maybe, even find love in the process…
The alumni of Camp Phoenix, a summer program for at-risk youth, went their separate ways, but now they’ve been called back to help the camp reopen for a new crop of kids. Now successful adults, the four women pledge to restore the grounds to their former glory, if long-standing rivalries and old flames don’t get in the way first…
Bree White fought hard to get away from her criminal family and all of the reminders of her past until Sheriff Flint Decker brings all those feelings back and more. Attorney Violet Cook owes her life to Camp Phoenix and is determined to save the camp…but who’s going to save her from the temptation of long-time crush US Marshal Lincoln Traeger? Kinley Parker never left Camp Phoenix, dedicating her life to it, and has no time for pushy cowboys like Jackson Hart until butting heads leads to sparks. The daughter of the camp’s founder. Clementine McClain has always wanted to follow in her law-abiding father’s footsteps, but her father’s protégé and former bad boy Duke Cody has her breaking all the rules.  

My Review:

The image of the phoenix is a powerful one, a being of flame, rising from the ashes of its previous self. That’s the image that Sheriff Bill McClain of Jasper Creek invoked when he built Phoenix Camp. He made the camp into a place where teens who were heading down bad roads would have a chance to take a breath in a safe place and look hard at their past selves and, with support and understanding, choose to rise from their own ashes.

When The Comeback Cowboy opens, Bill has passed and the camp has been neglected for years. It’s going to take time, money and more than a bit of elbow grease to bring the place back from its own ashes.

Just as both McClain and the camp he created once helped its alumni pick up their pieces and move on, so now it’s their turn to bring the place that helped them back so that Camp Phoenix can help a new generation of kids who need it as much as they did.

So there’s not just one “comeback cowboy” in this book, there are four; Flint, Lincoln, Jackson and Duke. All are now in their early 30s, and they all “graduated” from the school of hard knocks but, thanks to McClain, found a better path than their lives had originally intended them for. Jackson Hart, forced to retire from the DEA after a career-ending injury, now owns the old camp. And he’s determined to turn it back into the saving place it once was – and to save himself as well.

His friends all come back to help him with the many, many dirty jobs that will be needed to make that happen. And he coaxes, persuades, orders, whatever, a group of the successful women who once walked that same misguided path that he and his friends did. Women who owe their success to Bill McClain and Camp Phoenix every bit as much as those comeback cowboys do.

The story in The Comeback Cowboy is the story of putting, not the band – because this bunch was never all that together – but the camp back together. It’s about restoring the place and the traditions that made them each what they became.

A restoration that takes place in the background as the four women; Bree, Violet, Kinley and Clementine – who all hated and envied each other as teenagers – bond into a sisterhood that surprises them all. And find the love that none of them ever thought they would have or deserve – after the pasts they all share.

Escape Rating A-: The Comeback Cowboy is both one story and four stories at the same time. It’s about what the camp meant to them in the past, and what they hope it will mean to others in the future. It’s about giving back and not giving up.

And its four romances – all taking place at the same time and in the same place. But each of them just a bit different in spite of those similarities.

Bree and Flint’s romance is absolutely enemies-to-lovers. It’s hard to think of a situation that would create more enmity in the past – as well as embarrassment in the present – than their original not-cute-at-all meeting. When Bree was 14, and Flint was a newly fledged police officer, he arrested Bree for shoplifting. Instead of booking her he brought her to McClain which led to the camp which put her on the path to a much brighter future.

But she’s never forgotten and is not too sure she’s forgiven either. Falling in love with the man who arrested her was NOT in Bree’s plans. Stealing his hat, on the other hand, sparks off something special.

Each of the women ‘steals’ something from one of the men. An important something, like Flint’s hat. Or an annoying something, like Jackson’s ever-present and frequently squawking bullhorn. As love languages go, it’s certainly different.

At the same time it’s emblematic of who these people are and what parts of their lives they still need to re-think before they are ready for their own future. In other words, each of them needs to rise up like the phoenix one more time, and those so-important items are symbols of what they need to let go of to make that climb.

Violet and Lincoln’s romance is a bit of a second-chance one, as she had a huge crush on him back in the day, while he noticed how much she pretended to hate him but didn’t see her as more than a little girl – because she was much too young. Now they’re both adults, and both of them have traumas in their pasts that they need to let go of, symbolized by Lincoln’s grandmother’s locket that Violet makes off with.

In their different ways, both Kinley and Jackson need to, as his friends tell him, unclench. He can’t always be in control, and has to learn to let go of the facade that he can, while Kinley needs to let herself stand up for herself. Their ‘bone’ of contention is that damnable bullhorn that Jackson keeps putting between himself and the world that no one can truly control.

Clementine McClain and Duke Cody have known each other for years. She’s McClain’s daughter – and now she’s Duke’s cop partner. Their romance has the flavor of the ‘best friend’s little sister’ vibe, as Duke has watched Clementine grow up and does feel protective of her. That she’s his mentor’s daughter adds the spice of the forbidden to the whole thing. Once she was forbidden, but not anymore.

Three out of the four romances worked really well for this reader. It didn’t seem like Jackson and Kinley’s romance had quite enough time for it to not seem a bit too fast and more than a bit convenient, but the others had more than enough history to make what would otherwise be insta-love really zing. Clementine’s story had the added bonus of her personal journey from ‘one of the boys’, because that was the only way her dad could deal with her, to accepting herself as she is. That it’s all wrapped in how much she loves her dad, misses him, and still resents just how much he made her feel like her being female was an embarrassment to him added an interesting layer of complexity to her story.

In summary, because this does need one, I loved three of the romances, thought the fourth was OK, and found the story of the camp and its rise from its ashes to be delightful. If you love any of the included authors, or are looking for a bit of a contemporary western romance sampler, The Comeback Cowboy is a treat!

Review: Happy Place by Emily Henry

Review: Happy Place by Emily HenryHappy Place by Emily Henry
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Chick Lit, contemporary romance, relationship fiction, women's fiction
Pages: 400
Published by Berkley on April 25, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Harriet and Wyn have been the perfect couple since they met in college—they go together like salt and pepper, honey and tea, lobster and rolls. Except, now—for reasons they’re still not discussing—they don’t.
They broke up six months ago. And still haven’t told their best friends.
Which is how they find themselves sharing the largest bedroom at the Maine cottage that has been their friend group’s yearly getaway for the last decade. Their annual respite from the world, where for one vibrant, blue week they leave behind their daily lives; have copious amounts of cheese, wine, and seafood; and soak up the salty coastal air with the people who understand them most.
Only this year, Harriet and Wyn are lying through their teeth while trying not to notice how desperately they still want each other. Because the cottage is for sale and this is the last week they’ll all have together in this place. They can’t stand to break their friends’ hearts, and so they’ll play their parts. Harriet will be the driven surgical resident who never starts a fight, and Wyn will be the laid-back charmer who never lets the cracks show. It’s a flawless plan (if you look at it from a great distance and through a pair of sunscreen-smeared sunglasses). After years of being in love, how hard can it be to fake it for one week… in front of those who know you best?
A couple who broke up months ago make a pact to pretend to still be together for their annual weeklong vacation with their best friends in this glittering and wise new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry.

My Review:

Ironically, Harriet’s “happy place” isn’t all that happy when she arrives – no matter how much everyone, including Harriet, tries to recapture the happiness they all always feel when they get there.

Once upon a time, all the way at the beginning of their freshman year at Mattingly College, the algorithm that matches up roommates matched three girls who, on the surface, couldn’t have been more different.

A serendipitous match that gave Harriet, Cleo and Sabrina the ‘sisters from another mister’ that none of them had ever had. They belonged together in a way that was so profound that it took them through college, graduate school, and beyond, culminating every summer at Lobster Fest in a tiny coastal town in Maine where Sabrina’s extended birth and step-family owned a gigantic, fully stocked summer house. (Honestly, more like a summer mansion or a compound. It’s vast and sprawling and perfect – except for one teensy little problem which we’ll get to in a minute.)

Every summer, the girls share one fantastic week together, a tradition that has not wavered as they have each found other roommates, friends and lovers along life’s way. As this summer visit begins, the three have been six for several years, and they are all thirty years old or on the cusp of it.

Sabrina, the great organizer of the group, has pulled them all together – in spite of more than one person’s reluctance – because this is going to be the last summer of their happy place. Her dad has sold the house.

But that’s not the only rain on this particular parade. On the one hand, there’s the good news that Sabrina and her lover, Parth, are getting married that weekend, on the beach near the house, with all their besties around them.

Sabrina and Parth’s good news – if it actually happens – is overshadowed by whatever is eating at Cleo and her girlfriend Kimmy – which is in its turn eating at Sabrina. Harriet, in the second year of a medical residency, has pushed everyone away, partly out of exhaustion but mostly in denial over her own depressing secret.

A secret that greets her at the door, when her long-term ex-fiance is waiting, intending to help her keep up the deception that they are still together. When they’re not. And haven’t been for several months but haven’t managed to tell anyone.

Because they fear it will affect the dynamic of the group – a group which has become a family they both need – whether separately or together.

And because they don’t really want to let each other go – no matter how much they each believe the other is better off without them.

Escape Rating B+: I went into Happy Place hoping for another Book Lovers – which I utterly adored. When I didn’t get that, I found this to be a tough read for most of its length, but now that I’ve finished the book I keep thinking about it and it’s turning out to be one of those cases where the whole is absolutely greater than the sum of its parts.

The story as it progresses seemed like a giant misunderstandammit for the longest time. But the thing about those kinds of books is that what makes them so awkward is that it’s obvious to the reader that all it would take would be one frank conversation to clear up the mess.

That’s not true here. While a bit of frankness would go a long way, it would take WAY more than one conversation to clear things up. All of them are bottling up how they really feel or what is really going on in order to keep the peace – and it’s not working for anyone.

Just as occurred in Book Lovers, this mess needs to build up to an explosion for that air to get cleared. It just takes a week of heating up before it all boils over.

On top of that, what really got to me about this story as I looked back at it was just that, the looking back. Because this is the last summer at their ‘happy place’ they are all aware that an era is ending. That, in combination with all of them turning 30 this year, makes all of them realize that life is changing and that this family that sustains all of them could come to an end if they don’t figure things out and learn to adapt to the changes they are all going through.

And yet, with the secrets hanging over them, they are in danger of not figuring things out. With all the nostalgia on tap on this trip, and with all of the music they play because it is the background of their lives together, (and because they mention Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” playing on the radio) I realized that this is the summer where they are all aware that whatever happens next for any of them, the years they spent together are the “Glory Days” they will be looking back on for the rest of their lives.

The question in the story is whether they can get beyond what’s driving them apart to find a new way to hold each other together – no matter where the future takes each of them.

In the end, I didn’t love Happy Place the way I did Book Lovers. But once I finished I realized that I liked it quite a bit more than I initially thought!

Review: The Way of the Bear by Anne Hillerman

Review: The Way of the Bear by Anne HillermanThe Way of the Bear (Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito #8) by Anne Hillerman
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, thriller
Series: Leaphorn Chee & Manuelito #26
Pages: 288
Published by Harper on April 25, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Fossil harvesting, ancient lore, greed, rejected love and murder combine in this gripping new installment of New York Times bestselling author Anne Hillerman's Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito series.
An unexpected death on a lonely road outside of Utah's Bears Ears National Park raises questions for Navajo Tribal Police officers Jim Chee and Bernadette Manuelito. Why would a seasoned outdoorsman and well-known paleontologist freeze to death within walking distance of his car? A second death brings more turmoil. Who is the unidentified man killed during a home invasion where nothing seems to have been taken? Why was he murdered?
The Bears Ears area, at the edge of the Navajo Nation, is celebrated for its abundance of early human habitation sites and the discovery of unique fossils which revolutionized the scientific view of how early animals dealt with their changing world. For Chee and Bernie, the area glows with geological interest and spiritual insight. But their visit to this achingly beautiful place is disrupted by a current of unprecedented violence that sweeps them both into danger.
An illicit business, a fossilized jaw bone, hints of witchcraft, and a mysterious disappearance during a blizzard and to the peril. It will take all of Manuelito's and Chee's experience, skill, and intuition to navigate the threats that arise beneath the twin buttes that give Bears Ears its name and to see justice served.

My Review:

In its initial incarnation, the Leaphorn & Chee series was a creation of the late Tony Hillerman, who took the tried-and-true concept of a series featuring mismatched investigative partners and set it in the place that he knew and loved, the Navajo Reservation at the four corners where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah meet. His often-at-loggerheads detectives were the young and idealistic Jim Chee and the older, more experienced and more cynical Joe Leaphorn.

The initial series ended when its author passed away, and was much missed.

Missed so much, in fact, that Tony Hillerman’s daughter Anne revived the series with Spider Woman’s Daughter in 2013, adding Navajo Nation Police officer Bernadette “Bernie” Manuelito to the series in order to give Jim Chee a new partner – and romantic interest – in the wake of ‘Legendary Lieutenant’ Joe Leaphorn’s retirement. When Leaphorn is shot and very nearly killed in the opening of Spider Woman’s Daughter, the torch of the series literally passes from his or Chee’s perspective to Bernie’s.

As the series has continued through the following seven more books, the investigations have continued but the investigative tensions between Chee and Manuelito have shifted in ways that give this entry in the series much of its heart even as the case they have wandered into the middle of threatens not just their lives but the lives of many in the harsh, beautiful, protected and sacred area named Shash Jaa’ by the Navajo and Bears’ Ears National Monument by (U.S.) presidential proclamation.

Escape Rating A-: In case it’s not clear, I’ve loved this entire series from my first read – actually a listen – thirty years ago with The Blessing Way. This latest entry in the series was absolutely no exception.

Part of what I enjoy about the series is the way that it explores – not just a compelling mystery set in a beautiful part of the country told from the perspective of someone who is familiar with it – but the way that it takes the usual trope of the push-pull between two investigators with two different approaches to the work and layers it not just with the tensions that occur in a romantic partnership in the same branch of the same work – because both of things have been done before and done well.

The aspect of the relationship that draws me into this series is the difference in Chee’s and Manuelito’s responses to the traditions of their people. Both of them believe strongly in those traditions – as Joe Leaphorn did not – which often put Leaphorn and Chee at odds. Jim Chee frequently, often and repeatedly considered leaving the police and training as a Hatááłii, a practitioner of traditional healing ceremonies. The trip that sends Chee and Manuelito to Bears’ Ears includes an opportunity for Chee to explore this possibility yet again.

But it is, and has always been, a choice for him. Bernie, as a daughter and a sister, is often caught between the demands that tradition places on her because of those roles, and her career as a police officer. For her, it is never a serious choice – she just has to deal with constantly being pulled in multiple directions as best she can.

Both Chee and Manuelito enter this book at a crossroads – a crossroads that affects their marriage and their pursuit of this case. Which turn out to be rather strangely parallel, as both situations are about looking inside oneself and determining the direction of one’s life, even though the case is, on the surface at least, about greed.

But the people who are caught up in it are motivated by something else altogether no matter how twisted their interpretation of it might be. And in seeing how twisted they have become in the course of the investigation, it helps Chee and Bernie figure out how to deal with the issues that have arisen between them.

As always, a satisfactory resolution to both the personal and the professional, although not a permanent one – as there never is. I expect something equally fascinating on both parts of that equation in the next book in the series, hopefully in time for my birthday next year!

The Sunday Post AKA What’s on my (Mostly Virtual) Nightstand 4-23-23

This was a Grade A reading week from beginning to end. Which is kind of fitting, as today is the start of National Library Week, celebrating a place and an experience where so many of us began our lifelong love of reading. I certainly did. Libraries, for me also represent both a sweet memory and a lifelong bad habit. Procrastinating work on research papers in high school guaranteed a trip to the big downtown library with my dad. So I got both a whole afternoon of his attention – which was always hard to get – and a couple of hours in the palace of wonder otherwise known as the Cincinnati Public Library’s Main Library. It was a win-win for me at the time – but I have to confess that the procrastination habit has not served me all that well in the long run. But in that short run the whole thing was pretty damn sweet.

And speaking of sweet, here’s a picture of George, sweetly curled up on our new comforter. It really brings out his orangeness, doesn’t it?

Current Giveaways:

$10 Gift Card or $10 Book in the Just Because Giveaway Hop (ENDS TONIGHT!!!!!)
$10 Gift Card or $10 Book in the Dancing in the Rain Giveaway Hop (ENDS THURSDAY!)

Blog Recap:

A+ Review: Who Cries for the Lost by C.S. Harris
A Review: Wings Once Cursed and Bound by Piper J. Drake
A Review: Three Debts Paid by Anne Perry
A- Review: Unraveling by Peggy Orenstein
A+ Review: Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments by T.L. Huchu
Stacking the Shelves (545)

Coming This Week:

The Way of the Bear by Anne Hillerman (review)
Happy Place by Emily Henry (review)
The Comeback Cowboy by Jackie Ashenden, Caitlin Crews, Nicole Helm, Maisey Yates (blog tour review)
The Beach Reads Bookshop by Lee Tobin McClain (blog tour review)
The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw (audio review)

Stacking the Shelves (545)

This week’s stack got just a bit out of hand (LOL). On that other hand, I did get some really pretty covers in The Blue, Beautiful World and The Curse of Penryth Hall. I’ve finished one book (Excalibur) and am in the middle of the audio of The Salt Grows Heavy which is creepy and poetic at the same time. And Galen’s read The Ship Beneath the Ice because he’s always drawn to stuff about the Shackleton Expedition. So we have pretty, compelling and interesting already checked off of the book bingo boxes for this week’s stack!

For Review:
All the Dead Shall Weep (Gunnie Rose #5) by Charlaine Harris
And Then She Fell by Alicia Elliott
The Blue, Beautiful World by Karen Lord
The Curse of Penryth Hall by Jess Armstrong
Daughters of Latin America edited by Sandra Guzman
Dreambound by Dan Frey
Excalibur (Sentinel Security #5) by Anna Hackett
The General and Julia by Jon Clinch
The Great Escape by Saket Soni
Happiness Falls by Angie Kim
Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo
The New Life by Tom Crewe
The Only Purple House in Town (Fix-It Witches #4) by Ann Aguirre
The Piano Tuner by Chiang-sheng Kuo
The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw (audio)
The Ship Beneath the Ice by Mensun Bound
The Six by Loren Grush
Witch King by Martha Wells (audio)
You Are Here by Karin Lin-Greenberg (audio)
You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith


If you want to find out more about Stacking The Shelves, please visit the official launch page

Please link your STS post in the linky below:

Review: Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments by T.L. Huchu

Review: Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments by T.L. HuchuOur Lady of Mysterious Ailments by T.L. Huchu
Narrator: Kimberly Mandindo
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Series: Edinburgh Nights #2
Pages: 357
Length: 9 hours and 1 minute
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on April 5, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Opening up a world of magic and adventure, Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments by T. L. Huchu is the second audiobook in the Edinburgh Nights series.

Ropa Moyo’s ghost-talking practice has tanked. Desperate for money to pay bills and look after her family, she reluctantly accepts a job to look into the history of a coma patient receiving treatment at the magical private hospital Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments. The patient is a teenage schoolboy called Max Wu, and healers at the hospital are baffled by the illness which has confounded medicine and magic.

Ropa’s investigation leads her to the Edinburgh Ordinary School for Boys, one of only the four registered schools for magic in the whole of Scotland (the oldest and only one that remains closed to female students).

But the headmaster there is hiding something and as more students succumb, Ropa learns that a long-dormant and malevolent entity has once again taken hold in this world.

She sets off to track the current host for this spirit and try to stop it before other lives are endangered.

My Review:

In the wake of the tumultuous events at the conclusion of The Library of the Dead, ghost talker Ropa Moyo is in an even deeper hole now than she was then. She’s broke (always), unemployed and indebted to both the Director of the Society of Skeptical Enquirers (read as Mages’ Guild) and the leader of the criminal gang that controls Edinburgh. And that’s before she’s voluntold into finding the source of the magical ailment affecting young men who make the mistake of astral projection – for no pay whatsoever, while chasing down any opportunity she can to make enough money to support her grandmother and baby sister. Meanwhile her gran is predicting the end of the world, and the Society’s nobs and snobs are relentless in trying to kick Ropa off the tiny foothold she’s gained in scientific magic.

There are days when she wonders if it might be easier, safer AND more profitable to go back to just being a ghost talker. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned about Ropa after that first awesome book, it’s that she always keeps moving forward and never back. Not even when perhaps she should.

Escape Rating A+: Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments is just like The Library of the Dead in one very important point. The story rides or dies on the voice of Ropa Moyo. Both her narrative voice and her actual voice in the audiobooks – even though she is not voiced by the same narrator this time around. This series so far is one of those stories, because of the strength and the idiosyncratic thought processes of its first-person narrator, that works infinitely better in audio than text.

I read this book last year for a Library Journal review and loved it then. But the audiobook, this time narrated by Kimberly Mandindo, was just that much better that I stayed up late listening to finish even though I already knew how it ended. The audio is just that good.

Ropa’s Edinburgh is a hot mess in the summer – and a cold mess in the winter. The city is just a mess, period. It’s clear from hints in the books that there was some kind of apocalypse – and not all that far in our future. A part of me wants to call this story dystopian, but my mind balks at that a bit. Not that the situation isn’t FUBAR’ed but it feels like most of what’s wrong isn’t all that different from what’s wrong with the world right now.

Which is part of the point. Because one of the excellent and screamingly frustrating things about this story and Ropa’s journey within it is that it does such a damn good job of showing just how high and how thoroughly the deck is stacked against someone because of the circumstances of their birth. Ropa is still only 15 in this story and works her butt off every single second and it’s never enough because she’s female, she’s black, and she was born in a slum project.

What makes her worth following is that she knows the game is rigged against her and she keeps playing anyway, striving for a decent present and future for her family that nearly every authority has already decided they don’t deserve.

And she just might make it. Or she might be disappointed yet again. But she keeps moving forward anyway.

At first in – also at – the private magical hospital Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments – Ropa is brought in to investigate just what magic a group of privileged students at Edinburgh’s most prestigious – and of course exclusively male – magical academies got themselves mixed up in was so stupidly dangerous that it’s killing them by boiling them up from the inside.

Her investigation takes a detour when she’s presented with the opportunity to help a lost heir claim a stolen fortune – the finder’s fee for which she and her family need rather badly. Particularly as she’s not allowed to make a penny on that first job.

Between the two gigs Ropa is taking too many shortcuts, assuming much too much about the veracity of what she’s been told, and getting way too much exercise in jumping to conclusions without having all the facts in her hands – or head.

Only to find herself in the real, actual Library of the Dead, reading the book made from a dead practitioner, learning that there’s way more rotten in the state of Scotland in general and Scottish magic in particular than she ever wanted to know.

And that the plots go higher and deeper than anyone ever wanted a mere unpaid intern to discover. Which may be the reason that “opportunity” was presented to Ropa in the first place.

We’ll find out more – by digging deeper into the political muck – in the next book in this fantastic series, The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle, coming in July. I am eagerly anticipating the eARC, but I expect I’ll be picking up the audiobook as well. Because I want to read the new book ASAP, AND I still want the extra pleasure of hearing Ropa tell me her story in her own, inimitable style.