Category: C Reviews

#AudioBookReview: The Sirens by Emilia Hart

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews> C Reviews
#AudioBookReview: The Sirens by Emilia HartThe Sirens by Emilia Hart
Narrator: Barrie Kreinik
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Australian history, fantasy, historical fantasy, historical fiction, magical realism
Pages: 352
Length: 10 hours and 56 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, St. Martin's Press on February 13, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A story of sisters separated by hundreds of years but bound together in more ways than they can imagine
2019: Lucy awakens in her ex-lover’s room in the middle of the night with her hands around his throat. Horrified, she flees to her sister’s house on the coast of New South Wales hoping Jess can help explain the vivid dreams that preceded the attack—but her sister is missing. As Lucy waits for her return, she starts to unearth strange rumours about Jess’s town—tales of numerous missing men, spread over decades. A baby abandoned in a sea-swept cave. Whispers of women’s voices on the waves. All the while, her dreams start to feel closer than ever.
1800: Mary and Eliza are torn from their loving home in Ireland and forced onto a convict ship heading for Australia. As the boat takes them farther and farther away from all they know, they begin to notice unexplainable changes in their bodies.
A breathtaking tale of female resilience, The Sirens is an extraordinary novel that captures the sheer power of sisterhood and the indefinable magic of the sea.

My Review:

The Sirens turned out to be a book that I just plain need to get out of my system so I can make like Elsa and “let it go”. And that’s not a good thing.

Normally I do a plot summary/commentary first, but I don’t think I can here because saying anything more than is in the blurb would be a spoiler as nothing is revealed at the start. The whole story is about secrets and their very slow reveal in a family that has so much dysfunction – and such a unique dysfunction at that – that it lasts centuries. If not longer.

It takes place in two distinct timelines two centuries apart, the early 1800s and the early 2000s. The stories are wrapped around a pair of sisters in each timeline, seemingly joined by a rare and common disease. Or a birth defect. Or a genetic anomaly. Or perhaps, all of the above.

They’re not exactly allergic to water, but they all have aquagenic urticaria, which is a real thing that Mary and her sister Eliza certainly wouldn’t have had a name for in the early 1800s, although Jess and her sister Lucy in the early 21st century certainly do. Not that it helps, particularly as their expression of the condition seems unique to the four of them. They don’t get hives, they get scales – and sprout gills.

The story both is, and isn’t, about their shared condition. Rather, it’s about the secrets that are kept from them because of it, and the events that occur as a result of their need or desire to hide it and the traumas that are a consequence of all of the above.

That Jess and Lucy are both dreaming of Mary and Eliza throughout the story, and experience their fate with them within those dreams, links the past and the present in ways that Jess and Lucy don’t expect – but the reader certainly does long before the story comes to its conclusion.

Escape Rating C: I came so very close to DNF’ing this one really early on. The only reason I kept going is that I received an ALC (Advance Listening Copy) through Netgalley and that’s one queue I try to keep relatively clean. I tried reading the thing instead because that would be faster but couldn’t manage that either, so I stayed with the audio and increased the speed – which I seldom do because I’m normally there for the voices.

The narrator in this particular case, Barrie Kreinik, was very good and I’d certainly be willing to listen to another book she narrated. She even sang, and sang well, the parts that needed singing, but the book as a whole drove me so far round the bend that I just needed to get it done.

I honestly expected to like this. And I did like the historical parts – both because the history is fascinating and because, in spite of Mary’s story being ‘told’ through Jess’ and Lucy’s dreams, Mary and Eliza’s story was still mostly ‘shown’ rather than ‘told’. We see the action – and its results, as they happen, and it’s raw and harrowing and immediate even though it takes place two centuries ago. Mary may be filled with angst and fear and regret – and she often is and rightfully so considering what happens to her – but in the moment she acts and doesn’t angst before and regurgitate after.

Which is far from the case when it comes to Lucy’s story. Lucy’s story is not merely told instead of shown nearly all the time, but it’s told in the most distancing way possible. First she angsts over what’s about to happen. Then she angsts over it while it’s happening and we see the event through her emotions about the event rather than the event itself. Afterwards she chews over the event that has already passed and angsts about it even more.

The thing is that the story is told from inside Lucy’s head, but we’re not actually in Lucy’s head. Instead the story is told from a third-person perspective that puts Lucy’s thoughts and emotions at a distance. That so much of Lucy’s story is told either through Lucy listening to podcasts or Lucy reading newspaper articles and Jess’ diary puts even more distance in that distance.

So we’re not close enough to Lucy to FEEL with her, and her pattern of telling most of the parts of the story three times made it difficult for me to feel FOR her as I just wanted her to get on with it. That I figured things out LONG before she did left me waiting for someone or something to hit her with a clue-by-four because she really, really needed one.

Putting it another way, Lucy’s story is distant because it’s filtered and chewed over and gnawed at and angsted about. We get so much of Lucy processing her story, like a cow chewing its cud, that we don’t experience it. And it feels as if neither does she.

In the end, I got left with a whole heaping helping of mixed feelings. The story turned out to be a whole lot of atmosphere, often creepy, a great deal of deserved angst and not a lot of action until very near the end when all the various plot threads come to an ending that should have been a surprise but mostly wasn’t. The historical story about the horrors of the convict transport ships that carried prisoners from Britain to Australia was searing and horrifying every nautical mile. It was a dark journey and a dark time in a dark age.

The concept of Jess’ and Lucy’s part of the story had the potential to tell a story of female resilience and the power of sisterhood, but that part of the story got lost in the slow and repetitious way that it was told. There was so much potential in this story, but too much of it got washed away by the tides.

Of course, your reading mileage – even measured in nautical miles, kilometers or fathoms – may vary.

#BookReview: The Blanket Cats by Kiyoshi Shigematsu, translated by Jesse Kirkwood

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews> C Reviews
#BookReview: The Blanket Cats by Kiyoshi Shigematsu, translated by Jesse KirkwoodThe Blanket Cats by Kiyoshi Shigematsu, Jesse Kirkwood
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: literary fiction, magical realism, translated fiction, world literature
Pages: 272
Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on February 25, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Seven struggling customers are given the unique opportunity to take home a “blanket cat” . . . but only for three days, the time it’ll take to change their lives.
A peculiar pet shop in Tokyo has been known to offer customers the unique opportunity to take home one of seven special cats, whose “magic” is never promised, but always received. But there are rules: these cats must be returned after three days. They must eat only the food supplied by the owner, and they must travel to their new homes with a distinctive blanket.
In The Blanket Cats, we meet seven customers, each of whom is hoping a temporary feline companion will help them escape a certain reality, including a couple struggling with infertility, a middle-aged woman on the run from the police, and two families in very different circumstances simply seeking joy.
But like all their kind, the “blanket cats” are mysterious creatures with unknowable agendas, who delight in confounding expectations. And perhaps what their hosts are looking for isn’t really what they need. Three days may not be enough to change a life. But it might just change how you see it.

My Review:

The idea seems a bit, well, absurd – but in a good way. That a person would ‘rent’ a cat for three days and then return the cat. Actually, that’s not the absurd part. There are lots of reasons why someone would want a cat as a short term rental, and quite a few of them are covered in this collection.

A family who wants to give a visiting elderly relative one last good memory of the household by temporarily replacing a cat who passed away months ago. A person who lives in a pet-free apartment who takes their vacations with a cat because they aren’t permitted to keep one at home. A family pretending all is well when it really, really isn’t. A child who needs a friend and companion who won’t judge – unlike everyone around him.

Still, the idea of this loosely linked collection should seem familiar, as there are suddenly a lot of similar books available, translated from the original Japanese or Korean. The ideas are similar, the stories are a bit of magical realism on four paws, about lives that are changed for the better with the introduction of a magical cat. Or even just a bit of magic, as is the case with the best known book of this type, Before the Coffee Gets Cold.

Generally speaking, I have at least liked all of the books of this type I have picked up so far. Some more than others, of course, but generally have closed the book with a smile on my face even if there’s also a bit of a tear in my eye. And that’s true with or without the inclusion of a cat or two.

Because of the cats, however, this particular set of stories at first seemed a lot like We’ll Prescribe You a Cat, because the ‘Blanket Cats’ of these stories are also short-term placements – although there’s no hint of a prescription.

Instead, the blanket cats are trained to be rented by one person or family after another, able to feel ‘at home’ wherever they are placed as long as they have their own personal ‘comfort blanket’ and their prescribed diet. It shouldn’t work, and I’ll admit to wondering if it would in real life, but as a story convention it’s enough.

However, the cats really aren’t. Enough that is. Because in the individual stories it feels like the individuals and their situations are beyond saving and the poor cat gets caught in the middle. These kinds of stories are often ‘sad fluff’ in that there’s a lot of grief in the beginning but part of the magic, with or without cat, is that the change in perspective brought by the cat or the magic or both allows the humans to see things a bit differently and things do get better.

The stories in this collection just felt very, very sad, and there wasn’t that same catharsis that there was in We’ll Prescribe You a Cat or The Full Moon Coffee Shop.

Escape Rating C: I left this collection feeling even sadder than I began. As I wasn’t feeling well to begin with, this may have been the wrong book at the wrong time for this reader. And I’m sad about that, too.

#BookReview: Beast of the North Woods by Annelise Ryan

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews> C Reviews
#BookReview: Beast of the North Woods by Annelise RyanBeast of the North Woods (A Monster Hunter Mystery, #3) by Annelise Ryan
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery
Series: Monster Hunter Mystery #3
Pages: 320
Published by Berkley on January 28, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

When a local fisherman is mauled to death, it seems like the only possible cause is a mythical creature in the latest puzzling entry in this USA Today bestselling series.
An ice fisherman is savagely mauled to death in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, and an eyewitness claims the man was attacked by a hodag. There's just one problem with it's well known that the creature is not real and was created by a local hoaxer. So how could an imaginary creature be chomping on local sportsmen? 
The suggestion that a hodag killed someone isn’t well received by the townsfolk because of its beloved ties to the town and the money it generates from tourist dollars. Due to this, people begin to suspect the witness is the real killer, especially when it’s discovered he has a tangled past with the victim. 
The witness to the attack happens to be the nephew of Morgan Carter’s bookstore employee, Rita Bosworth, who convinces the professional cryptozoologist to travel to Wisconsin to prove that a hodag not only exists but killed the victim. 
Clues may be hard to come by, but one thing's for something killed that man, and that something now has its eyes focused on Morgan.

My Review:

I picked this up because I liked the first book in the series, A Death in Door County, and I really enjoyed the second, Death in the Dark Woods. I started this third book hoping that the upward trend continued.

It didn’t. At least not for this reader. As always, your reading mileage may vary.

What mostly worked in the first book – and definitely worked in the second – was the way that bookstore owner, budding amateur detective and professional cryptozoologist Morgan Carter uses her actual professional credentials for hunting monsters to find actual monsters, even though – or especially because – the monster she starts out hunting is absolutely not the monster she finds.

In other words, she’s usually on the track of Bigfoot. Or something like Bigfoot. Or Nessie. Or in the case of the Beast of the North Woods, a Hodag. Now the Hodag is a proven hoax – because the person who supposedly captured one in 1893 eventually confessed to the deception.

Not that the town of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, which really does exist, hasn’t made plenty of hay (or at least tourist dollars) out of being the home of the Hodag. But no one expects to see a living, breathing beast in the area.

The Hodag in its ‘natural’ habitat.

Except that someone claims they have, and that the beast they saw mauled a man to death in the woods. The local police are sure the dude who reported the body is attempting, badly, to cover up a murder. One that he committed himself, of course.

Morgan is 99% convinced he didn’t see a Hodag. Which doesn’t mean the guy is guilty of the murder. Even if the dead man seems to have been his lifelong rival if not outright enemy.

In Morgan’s previous adventures, she hasn’t found Bigfoot, or Nessie, or any other cryptids. She certainly doesn’t expect to find a Hodag in this case. That she actually DOES find one this time around is more than a bit of a surprise. That there are human monsters hiding in the shadows behind the cryptid is no surprise at all.

That her EvilEx™ seems to be messing with her head from the very beginning very nearly has Morgan running through the woods in terror LONG before the Hodag EVER makes the already messed-up scene in a way that threw this reader all the way out of a story that I was really hoping to love.

Escape Rating C: For this reader, the second book in this series, Death in the Dark Woods, was the one that hit the sweet spot. The first book went into just a bit too much detail about the flora and fauna of Door County, although that served as great background for just how Morgan approached her cryptid hunting. That first story also introduced the best character in the whole series and a very good boi, Morgan’s dog Newt. If I continue to read this series – and at the moment that issue is seriously in doubt – it’ll be to see how Newt is doing because he’s just awesome.

Unfortunately, that first book also introduced us, at least in absentia, to Morgan’s EvilEx™, David Johnson. David murdered her parents, framed her for his crime, disappeared into the wind and has been stalking her ever since. I have to confess that the stalker ex is one of my least favorite plot devices, so having him lurk over this particular entry in the series from not very far away at all just took me right out of the story. (I know this is a ‘me’ thing and may not be a ‘you’ thing and your mileage may vary, etc., etc., etc.)

This series, by its nature of starting out hunting mythical monsters, is always just a hair away from ‘jumping the shark’ and for me the frequent references to David Johnson – or whoever he really is – sent the whole thing right over the top of the shark and its wake.

And Morgan spends entirely too much of this story not thinking clearly, mostly because of David but not completely, that she seems to miss all the clues until its too late and she’s briefly in the frame for yet another murder she didn’t commit. Poor Newt has his work cut out for him this time around.

(I LOVE Newt. He’s a very good boi and don’t worry, he’s just fine throughout this story. It’s his human who keeps ending up in serious trouble.)

So this is the point where I’m going to admit that I’m seriously thinking of bailing on this series. I was hoping for something like Death in the Dark Woods, a cozy monster hunting mystery – as much of a contradiction in terms that should be but wasn’t. I needed a comfort read and that’s not what I got at all, so this was the wrong book at the wrong time and relied heavily on a plot device that makes me cringe. Color this reader disappointed.

I know I keep saying this, but it bears repeating, YOUR READING MILEAGE MAY VARY.

#AudioBookReview: Merry Ever After by Tessa Bailey

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews> C Reviews
#AudioBookReview: Merry Ever After by Tessa BaileyMerry Ever After (Under the Mistletoe Collection, #2) by Tessa Bailey
Narrator: Summer Morton, Connor Crais
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, erotic romance, holiday romance, short stories
Series: Under the Mistletoe #2
Pages: 59
Length: 1 hour and 32 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on November 12, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

A single mother working in a thrift store. A gentle giant farmer who can’t find jeans that fit. When opposites attract, they find themselves making alterations in more ways than one in this smoking-hot short story by #1 New York Times bestselling author Tessa Bailey.
Evie Crowe is starting over in a strange town with her newborn, and men are the furthest thing from her mind. If only the quiet, hulking farmer, Luke Ward, would stop coming into the thrift shop and piquing her reluctant interest. Evie wants to stay single all the way—she can’t trust anything more than friends-with-holiday-benefits. But Luke is in it for the long haul. He’s fixed on making this a Christmas Evie will remember forever. If she gives him a chance.
Tessa Bailey’s Merry Ever After is part of Under the Mistletoe, a stirring collection of December romances that thrill and tingle all the way. They can be read or listened to in one swoony sitting.

My Review:

Today is the last day of 2024. It’s part of the ‘twilight zone’ of time between Xmas and New Year’s, when time is really REAL, when the days all sort of blend together, when it seems as if time is sorta/kinda infinite and not necessarily in a good way.

I am a terrible completist. By that I mean that I have a tendency to feel compelled to complete things – especially when it comes to book series. Not that I absolutely can’t stop if something isn’t working for me, but when something is working then I have to get and finish them all – no matter how long it takes.

Because this is New Year’s Eve, I have to confess that I don’t expect Reading Reality to get a ton of readers today. But I feel compelled to have a post every single day – there I go with the completist thing again. Adding to that compulsion, I have listened to all of the other novellas in the Under the Mistletoe collection, so I simply couldn’t let the season go by without finishing this last story in the set.

Which leads us to today, December 31, 2024, and my review of Merry Ever After. (It’s still Hanukkah, so it could also be said that from my perspective it is still very much the holiday season and not too late for a holiday read or listen. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!)

The first, and possibly most important thing to know before jumping into this story is that I was wrong about Merriment and Mayhem being the steamiest story Under the Mistletoe. Because hands down – or perhaps that should be other parts down (and potentially getting rugburn in places no one wants rugburn) Merry Ever After is definitely the steamiest.

To the point where I wouldn’t listen to this where anyone else could hear it. I felt a bit like a voyeur listening to it all by myself in the car. (Also, one never arrives at one’s destination at a convenient point for either the scene or the listener.)

Second, while all of the stories in this collection are short by the very nature of the collection, this one was too short for the depth of the relationship it dove just about straight into. While all of the stories except Cruel Winter with You had hints of insta-love – and Cruel Winter had considerably more than hints – they all did a good job of making the relationships seem a bit longer, at least as friendships and/or leaned into the holiday romance fantasy aspect enough to make it seem not quite so instantaneous.

It’s not just that Evie and Luke jump into bed really, really fast – or in their case get down and dirty on the living room rug – it’s that the depth of their commitment seems to go from zero to sixty too fast for the emotional baggage they’re each dragging along – as well as Evie’s sincere need not to bring someone as undependable and untrustworthy into her baby son’s life as his sperm donor turned out to be.

Not that Luke isn’t reliable and trustworthy, as it turns out, but Evie hasn’t had time to find that out, at least not yet.

And while I did like that this was multi-voiced, with Summer Morton voicing Evie’s perspective while Connor Crais handled Luke’s, Luke’s internal monologue veered really close to some fairly possessive lines right on the verge of stuff that made me really, really wary.

Escape Rating C: In the end, I had a LOT of mixed feelings about Merry Ever After, making it my least favorite story in the collection. Either this one needed a LOT more story to get these characters to the point where their relationship makes sense, or it needed to be a lot simpler by making it about just two adults who are still in a position to potentially screw up their own lives without collateral damage.

This turned out to not be the greatest end for my reading and listening adventures this year, but, it certainly felt cathartic to wrap-up the set, which, overall, I did have a lot of fun with.

As always, your reading/listening mileage may vary.

#AudioBookReview: I Made It Out of Clay by Beth Kander + #Excerpt

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> blog tours> book reviews> C Reviews> Excerpts
#AudioBookReview: I Made It Out of Clay by Beth Kander + #ExcerptI Made It Out of Clay by Beth Kander
Narrator: Gail Shalan
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, Hanukkah romance, holiday romance, magical realism
Pages: 352
Length: 9 hours and 47 minutes
Published by Harlequin Audio, Mira on December 10, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In this darkly funny and surprisingly sweet novel, a woman creates a golem in a desperate attempt to pretend her life is a romantic comedy rather than a disaster.
Nothing’s going well for Eve: She’s single, turning forty, stressed at work and anxious about a recent series of increasingly creepy incidents. Most devastatingly, her beloved father died last year, and her family still won’t acknowledge their sorrow.
With her younger sister’s wedding rapidly approaching, Eve is on the verge of panic. She can’t bear to attend the event alone. That’s when she recalls a strange story her Yiddish grandmother once told her, about a protector forged of desperation… and Eve, to her own shock, manages to create a golem.
At first everything seems great. The golem is indeed protective—and also attractive. But when they head out to a rural summer camp for the family wedding, Eve’s lighthearted rom-com fantasy swiftly mudslides into something much darker.

My Review:

This is going to be one of those reviews where I write AROUND the book more than I write ABOUT the book, because my reaction was considerably more about the issues it raised than it was about the content – and that’s saying something because I have more than a few of those as well. Just that some of those issues are ‘me’ things that may or may not be ‘you’ things.

As always, your reading mileage may absolutely vary, so in this particular case I’m pleased that I have an excerpt from the book to include so that you can judge for yourself whether this will turn out to be a book for you.

I have an additional reason for including the excerpt. I want you to have a chance to see what the book actually IS, rather than what the blurb says it is. Because that’s very much a case of never the twain shall meet.

As the story opens, Eve’s life is far, far, far from being a rom-com. Also, the story is neither darkly funny nor sweet, surprisingly or otherwise. And she doesn’t create the golem until nearly the halfway point of things.

But the story is dark, because Eve’s is in the middle of a long, dark night of the soul. Her beloved father died suddenly just barely a year ago as this Hanukkah story opens, and she’s still utterly devastated. She’s never gotten over the death of grandmother a few years previously, so she’s grieving double while her mother and sister both seem to be breezing along. She has few friends, she’s terribly lonely, and she’s eating her feelings constantly. As if that weren’t enough, her employer is hinting strongly at layoffs AFTER the holidays if not before.

In other words, Eve is in a pit and hasn’t stopped digging. It’s hard to read about just how terrible she’s feeling and how much depression she’s dragging around.

Which is where the audiobook, read marvelously by Gail Shalan, made things worse for me personally because she did such a terrific job as the narrator. When a story is written in the first person perspective, and it’s narrated by someone who is a great match for the character, I get a bit too deeply caught up in the character’s emotions.

And that’s what happened in I Made It Out of Clay. Not just because Eve and I are both Jewish, but because her Chicago neighborhood is where I used to live, her parents’ synagogue is in the town where I used to work and I lost my own father exactly the same way she did. It all got a bit too close – at least before she magicked up that golem – and I got so into her problems they were depressing me.

So my feelings about the story went to places that the author couldn’t possibly have known or intended, but absolutely did affect my reading and listening of it.

The story does get, well, livelier, for lack of a better term, and does head into the sort of horror-adjacent dark I was expecting from that blurb, once the golem arrives on the scene. Eve’s frantic efforts to disguise her wedding date as a real person and not a magical construct gave the story a lot more oomph than it had up to that point.

But I was too mired in her depression to see whatever funny or sweet parts there might be until the very, very end.

Escape Rating C: If you’re looking for this to be a Hanukkah-themed romantic comedy based on that blurb, you’re going to be in for a bit of disappointment. Instead, II would recommend you take a look at Love You a Latke by Amanda Elliot, Eight Nights to Win Her Heart by Miri White to fill that particular holiday craving and Magical Meet Cute by Jean Meltzer if you think your Hanukkah romance reading won’t be complete without at least one golem among your eight nights of presents.

Excerpt from I Made It Out of Clay by Beth Kander

The soft growl on the train is coming from me.
I flush with shame at the insistent rumbling of my stomach. Thankfully, the Monday-morning brown line is too crowded with bundled-up commuters for anyone but me to notice the sound. If someone does somehow clock it, they’ll probably assume it’s coming from the pigtailed pregnant woman I gave my seat to at the last stop.
The train lurches, and I nearly drop my peppermint mocha. Technically, you’re not supposed to have open food or beverages aboard, but no one follows that rule. You’ll only get in trouble if you spill on someone. Nobody really cares what’s going on in the background until the mess impacts them.
When my stomach rumbles yet again, the pigtailed pregnant woman gives me a conspiratorial look. Everyone else on the train might think it’s her, but she knows it’s me. She isn’t judging, though; her expression is friendly. Surprisingly kind and intimate in a maternal sort of way. I take in her pert nose, amused hazel eyes, and the beautiful coppery shade of her two neat, thick braids. I want to tell her I bet you’re gonna be a great mother—but who needs to hear that from a stranger? Besides, maybe she already is a mother. This might not be her first rodeo.
Another grumble from my midsection cues me to return my attention to myself. I smile weakly, averting my gaze as I take a slow sip of my mocha, attempting to temporarily silence my stomach’s demands. While I’ve always had a healthy appetite, lately it’s like I’m haunted by this constant craving. I can take the edge off sometimes, but I’m never really satisfied.
My granddaughter Eve, oy, let me tell you, she can really eat, my grandmother used to say with pride. But it wasn’t a problem when I was a kid. I was just a girl who liked food. Now, it’s like I can never get enough. I’ve been trying to tell myself it’s seasonal. The weather. Winter cold snap making everyone want to hibernate and fatten up like all those rotund city squirrels. But I think it’s something more than that.
Like, say, losing my father a year ago.
Or my looming fortieth birthday.
Or my little sister’s upcoming wedding.
Or the growing conviction that I’m going to die alone.
Or, most likely, all of the above.
Rather than sift through all the wreckage, it’s easiest to just blame my hungry malaise on December—and specifically, Christmas.
Holidays make excellent emotional scapegoats, and I’ve always had a powerful love/hate relationship with Christmas. I’m pretty sure that’s just part of growing up as a religious minority in America. The holiday to end all holidays is an omnipresent blur of red and green, a nonstop monthlong takeover of society as we know it, which magically manages to be both inescapable and exclusionary. It’s relentless. Exhausting.
But at the same time, dammit, the persistent cheer is intoxicating, and I want in on it.
That’s why I do things like set my vintage radio alarm to the twenty-four-hour-carols station that pops up every November for the “countdown to Christmas.” It’s an annual ritual I never miss, but also never mention to any of my friends—the literal definition of guilty pleasure, which might just be the most Jewish kind of enjoyment ever.
From Thanksgiving all the way until the New Year, I start every day with the sounds of crooning baritones, promises of holiday homecomings, and all those bells—silver, jingling, carol-of-the. I can’t help it. My whole life, I’ve loved all the glitzy aspects of the season. The sparkling lights adorning trees and outlining the houses and apartment buildings throughout Chicagoland always seemed so magical to the little Jewish girl with the only dark house on the block. And as an adult, God help me, I cannot get enough of seasonal mochas. (At the same time, I feel a need to assert my Hanukkah-celebrant status, resenting the default assumption that everyone celebrates Christmas. Because humans are complicated.)
One of the best and worst things about the holiday season is how much more you wind up chatting with other people. Wishing total strangers happy holidays, commenting on their overflowing shopping bags, chitchatting with people in line for the aforementioned addictive peppermint mochas. I’m not in the mood for it this year as much as in years past, but once in a while I’m glad to take advantage of the holiday-related conversational opportunities.
For instance, there’s a new guy in my apartment building. He moved in a few months ago. He has a British accent, thick dark brows, muscular arms, and a charming tendency to hold the door for everyone. I haven’t crushed this hard on someone since high school. We said hello a few times over the fall, but December has opened the door to much more lobby banter.
Hot Josh—which is what I call him when he’s not around, and am absolutely doomed to someday accidentally call him in person—has been getting a lot of boxes delivered to our lobby. Which, for better or worse, has given me multiple excuses to make stupid jokes. Most recently, a huge overseas package arrived; it had clearly cost a fortune to ship. Hot Josh made some comment about the overzealous shipper of said holiday package, rolling his eyes at the amount of postage plastered all over the box.
It’s better than if they forgot to put on any stamps at all, I said. Have you heard the joke about the letter someone tried to send without a stamp?
Uh, no? Hot Josh replied, raising an eyebrow.
You wouldn’t get it, I said, and snort-laughed.
He just blinked. Apparently, for some of us, all those cheery holiday conversational opportunities are more like sparkling seasonal landmines.
At the next train stop, only a few passengers exit, while dozens more shove their way in. The handful of departing passengers include the pigtailed pregnant woman. She rises awkwardly from her seat, giving me a hey-thanks-again farewell nod as she indicates I should sit there again.
I look around cautiously as I reclaim my seat, making sure no new pregnant, elderly, or otherwise-in-need folks are boarding. It’s only after I finish this courtesy check that I notice I’m now sitting directly across from a man in full Santa Claus gear.
He’s truly sporting the whole shebang: red crushed-velvet suit with wide black belt and matching buckle, epic white beard, and thigh-high black boots. His bowl-full-of-jelly belly is straining the buttons on the jacket, and I honestly can’t tell if it’s a pillow or a legit beer gut.
I’m not sure how to react. If Dad was here, he wouldn’t hesitate. He’d high-five Santa, and they’d instantly be best friends.
But I never know where to start, what to say. Like, should I smile at the guy? Refer to him as “Santa”? Maybe, like, salute him, or something?
I gotta at least take a picture and text it to Dad. He’d get such a kick out of this guy—
My hand automatically goes for my phone, pulling it swiftly from my pocket. But my amusement is cut off with a violent jerk when I touch the screen and nothing happens. That’s when I remember that my phone is off—and why I keep it off.
My rumbling stomach curdles. Even after a whole year, the habit of reaching for my phone to share something with my father hasn’t gone away. I’m not sure it ever will.
Shoving my phone back into my coat pocket, I ignore St. Nick and just stare out the filthy train windows instead. Even through this grayish pane streaked with God-knows-what horrific substances, the city is beautiful. I love the views from the train, even the inglorious graffiti and glimpses of small backyards. And now, every neighborhood in Chicago has its holiday decorations up.
This Midwestern metropolis, with its glittering architecture, elegant lakefront, and collection of distinct neighborhoods sprawling away from the water, knows how to show off. Most people think downtown is prettiest. But if you ask me, it’s hard to beat my very own neighborhood, Lincoln Square.
In the center of the Square is Giddings Plaza. In summertime the plaza’s large stone fountain is the bubbling backdrop to all the concerts and street festivals in the brick-paved square. But in wintertime, the water feature is drained and becomes the planter for a massive Christmas tree. Surrounded by all the perky local shops, the plaza is cute as hell year-round. When you add tinsel and twinkle lights and a giant fir tree that looks straight out of a black-and-white Christmas movie, it’s almost unbearably charming.
We haven’t had a proper snowfall yet, so the natural seasonal scenery has been lacking a little. But even with the bare tree limbs and gray skies, the stubbornly sparkling holiday decor provides a whispered promise of magic ahead.
I really want to believe in that magic.
The light shifts as we rattle beneath looming buildings and trees, and I briefly catch my reflection in the dirty window. Dark curls crushed beneath my olive-green knit cap, round cheeks, dark eyes, no makeup except a smear of lip gloss I bought because it was called Holiday Cheer. The details are all familiar, but I barely recognize myself. I wonder if I’ll ever feel like the real-me again, or if grief has made me into someone else entirely.
Last month marked the one-year anniversary of losing my dad. A whole year, and it still doesn’t feel real. Most days, it seems like I’m in the wrong version of my life. Or like everything around me is just some strange movie set I wandered onto and can’t seem to escape. I keep waiting for things to feel normal again. For me to feel normal again.
Hasn’t happened yet.

Excerpted from I MADE IT OUT OF CLAY by Beth Kander. Copyright © 2024 by Beth Kander. Published by MIRA, an imprint of HTP/HarperCollins.

#AudioBookReview: Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews> C+ Reviews
#AudioBookReview: Orbital by Samantha HarveyOrbital by Samantha Harvey
Narrator: Sarah Naudi
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from library
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: literary fiction, science fiction
Pages: 207
Length: 5 hours and 7 minutes
Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on December 5, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour.
A book of wonder, Orbital is nature writing from space and an unexpected and profound love letter to life on Earth
Six astronauts rotate in their spacecraft above the earth. They are there to collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.
Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?

My Review:

It begins in the morning, as all of their alarm clocks wake them for a brand new day. But all of those things are a bit, well, liminal, as day, night, and even sleep are all a bit nebulous and artificial for the six residents of the International Space Station.

The International Space Station, as photographed by Space Shuttle Atlantis.

The alarm clocks are real. Electronic, but still real. It’s the rest of the circumstances that are a bit adrift. Humans are tied to the 24-hour rotation of the Earth – but the ISS isn’t ON Earth. It’s rotating the planet in Low Earth orbit, 250 miles above the surface, 16 orbits per ‘day’.

So it’s artificially morning as decreed by ground control, an attempt to keep the humans aboard the ISS tethered to the planet of their origin. For the people involved, that tethering gets more than a bit unmoored as their mission goes on.

Because they experience MANY dawns every single orbit. It might not even be daylight under them or over them when they wake up – and even if it is it won’t be very soon.

But throughout the meticulous structure of their days, from observation to experimentation to being themselves part of the experiment of life in space, the planet and the life upon it is never far from their thoughts – even when it seems like it is.

This crew, astronauts Anton, Chie, Nell, and Shaun along with cosmonauts Pietro and Roman, may be the biggest part of this story but not the only part. Because they are all reflecting upon the life below them, their personal lives and the life of the planet, even as they look outward towards the future that has specifically just passed them by, literally as well as figuratively, as they and the rest of the world watch as four astronauts in a space capsule head on their outward journey back to the place where many of their own dreams of space began.

Escape Rating C+: I picked this entirely out of curiosity. Because it’s been labelled as science fiction but it won the Booker Prize, one of the big literary awards. In general, SF and Fantasy are the red-headed stepchildren of the literary world and just don’t win the big literary awards like the Booker. SF wins SF awards, and literary fiction wins the Booker.

Having finished this in audio, I’m at least clear on my answer to the conundrum. Orbital is very much in the Literary SF tradition, with the emphasis firmly on the literary in senses both good and less so.

So if you’re looking at this as an example of SF, it’s really not. If you’re interested in literary SF there are better examples. I’m particularly thinking of Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea. If this makes you curious about SF and are looking for something that has a bit of this feeling but also has a real, honest-to-goodness PLOT, take a look at Becky Chambers’ To Be Taught, If Fortunate, which is also a love letter to Earth and the life upon it while still managing to GET somewhere as it goes.

The audio narration by Sarah Naudi was utterly lovely, and does account for the plus in the grade. This is a relatively short book, and the beauty of the narration was enough to carry me through.

I liked the idea of this story, because space travel fascinates me. I loved the feeling of being in the astronauts’ and cosmonauts’ heads as they go about their work and the world revolves below them instead of underneath them. The prose is luminous and frequently rises to the poetic.

But there’s just not enough there to coalesce into an actual story. It’s more like a day in the life, and the whole point of each individual day in the life of the residents of the International Space Station is that it’s not supposed to be all that exciting. As one of them jokes, “If you’re an astronaut you’d rather not ever be news.” And he’s very much right.

In the end, I was left with the feeling that Orbital does its very best to never allow its bare scrim of a plot to get in the way of its poetry. Which made the individual observations lovely but does not a good story make. Nor does it make for good science fiction.

As always, your reading mileage may vary.

#BookReview: Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum translated by Shanna Tan

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews> C Reviews
#BookReview: Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum translated by Shanna TanWelcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-reum, Shanna Tan
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: books and reading, literary fiction, world literature
Pages: 320
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing on February 20, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The Korean smash hit available for the first time in English, a slice-of-life novel for readers of Matt Haig's The Midnight Library and Gabrielle Zevin's The Storied Life of AJ Fikry.
Yeongju is burned out. With her high-flying career, demanding marriage, and busy life in Seoul, she knows she should feel successful, but all she feels is drained. Yet an abandoned dream nags at her, and in a leap of faith, she leaves her old life behind. Quitting her job and divorcing her husband, Yeongju moves to a small residential neighborhood outside the city, where she opens the Hyunam-dong Bookshop.
For the first few months, all Yeongju does is cry, deterring visitors. But the long hours in the shop give her time to mull over what makes a good bookseller and store, and as she starts to read hungrily, host author events, and develop her own bookselling philosophy, she begins to ease into her new setting. Surrounded by friends, writers, and the books that connect them all, she finds her new story as the Hyunam-dong Bookshop transforms into an inviting space for lost souls to rest, heal, and remember that it's never too late to scrap the plot and start again.

My Review:

The title of the book makes the point of the story, as 30something, utterly stressed out Yeongju transforms herself into an independent bookstore owner in a close-knit but off the beaten path community.

Just as her high-pressure job and her equally pressured marriage once consumed Yeongju – sending her into a spiral of depression – opening the bookstore and returning to her childhood love of reading starts out as the antidote to those feelings.

Not that either the reader nor her concerned customers are entirely aware of that at first. We’re all aware of her depression, as her initial months of opening the store consist of her sitting on a stool inside the store with tears running down her face.

She’s clearly hit bottom in a whole lot of ways, but neither the reader nor her potential customers know precisely why. Not that her customers necessarily should, at least not until she’s willing to tell someone, but she’s drowning so hard that she’s closed off her internal life to the reader as well.

Which is similar in a lot of ways to the opening of the utterly charming and absolutely marvelous Days at the Morisaki Bookshop – with one critical difference. The reader gets a much more thorough picture of that protagonist, Takako, and her internal, utterly depressed, life because even though Takako isn’t talking much her mother and her uncle talk at her, to her, and about her enough for the reader to see inside her slough of despond and start to feel for her even as she starts to pull herself out.

At first, we know very little of what brought Yeongju to the bookshop or much of why she’s sitting in the midst of it weeping. But we do see the bookshop-owning butterfly emerge from her dark and tattered cocoon to take stock of the life she actually has and start looking towards its sustainability – for herself and for the people who come to see her bookshop as part of the warp and weft of their lives as much as she does.

And as Yeongju invests herself in welcoming others to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop, we finally begin to see glimpses of what drives her, what occasionally drives her back into her shell of depression, and the way that once she begins reaching out to others, they all begin to sustain each other.

Escape Rating C: I fell in love with both last week’s The Kamogawa Food Detectives and Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and picked this up hoping for something similar – or even in a sweet spot in between the two.

Sadly, that was not to be.

As much as I love books about books and reading, especially stories about bookstores and bookstore owners, I had a hard time getting into this one. It took me a while – entirely too long for the sake of my own personal reading schedule, in fact – to figure out that what was missing here that both of those books I hoped it would be a readalike for had was a central character or characters to carry the story.

Not that Yeongju isn’t there, but, well, for the first half of the book she really isn’t all there. She’s going through the motions, but we don’t see inside her nearly enough to be certain about what has brought her to that initial, depressing pass or get truly invested in how she gets herself out.

As she comes back to herself, and the bookshop reaches out to its community and the wider world as a result, we do start getting glimpses into what brings the other characters in the story to become part of the shop and the stories within, but Yeongju uses the increasing busy-ness of the shop and the life she has focused around it as a way of not looking back at what brought her there in the first place.

In the end, this was okay but not what I was hoping for. It has some of the elements of the two books that brought me here, that journey from depression to healing through the power of books and reading and community that is at the heart of Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and the loosely linked slices of life stories of The Kamogawa Food Detectives, but it doesn’t have the strong, central linchpin character to carry the book as a whole the way that both of those books did.

Which leaves me looking forward that much more and harder to the follow-up to Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, titled More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, coming in July. Because I do, still, very much, love books about books and reading and the transformative power of the two and have high hopes that the second book in that series will hit the same sweet spot as the first.

#BookReview: Remember Me by Mary Balogh

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews> C+ Reviews
#BookReview: Remember Me by Mary BaloghRemember Me (Ravenswood, #2) by Mary Balogh
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook
Genres: historical fiction, historical romance, regency romance
Series: Ravenswood #2
Pages: 368
Published by Berkley on June 20, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Can Lady Philippa Ware forgive the man who once shattered all her youthful dreams? Discover the passionate and heartwarming new novel on the redemptive power of love from New York Times bestselling author Mary Balogh.
Philippa, elder daughter of the Earl of Stratton, grew up eagerly anticipating a glittering debut and a brilliant marriage. Then her brother caught their father out in a clandestine affair and denounced him publicly. The whole family was disgraced, and Philippa's hopes grew dim, then were fully shattered when she overheard the dashing, handsome Marquess of Roath viciously insult her upon learning of her father's identity. Only years later does Philippa find the courage to go to London at last to meet the ton. She is an instant success and enjoys a close friendship with the granddaughter of a duke. Only one man can spoil everything for her, but surely he will not be in London this year.
The Duke of Wilby is nearing death and has tasked his grandson and heir, Lucas Arden, Marquess of Roath, with marrying and producing a son before it is too late. Lucas, who usually shuns London, goes there early in the Season in the hope of finding an eligible bride before his grandparents come and find one for him. He is instantly attracted to his sister's new friend, until that young lady asks a simple question: "Remember me?" And suddenly he does remember her, as well as the reason why the daughter of the Earl of Stratton is the one woman he can never marry--even if his heart tells him she is the only woman he wants.
Unfortunately for Philippa and Lucas, the autocratic duke and his duchess have other ideas and believe them to be perfect for each other. They will simply not take no for an answer. Telling Philippa the full truth is the hardest thing Lucas has ever faced, and the discovery of it will change them both before they discover the healing power of love.

My Review:

The elderly Duke of Wilby may be the most aptly titled character to ever grace the pages of a Regency romance. Because his will has been done, generally to his satisfaction, for most of his long life, and he fully intends that his will be done one last time before the end that his doctor has predicted comes to pass.

On the whole, Wilby is a rather benevolent dictator when it comes to his family, but he seems to have never been faced with an opposition implacable enough to stand against him that couldn’t be overcome. With the possible exceptions of time, old age and death. Although even there he’s negotiating for better terms – or at least terms of his own choosing.

He has only one surviving heir, his grandson Lucas. Lucas’ father died of recklessness years before, there was no spare, the old Duke had no brothers and the next heir is a cousin that frankly neither he nor Lucas believe is worthy of the title. Someone they know will have no care for the many female members of the family who will be left to his dubious mercy if Lucas dies before he has his own ‘heir and a spare’.

The elderly Duke – and his redoubtable Duchess – are determined that Lucas, now twenty six, will spend the coming Season in London, scouring the Marriage Mart for a bride they all find suitable – whether he wills it or not. For that matter, whether SHE wills it or not as well.

The seemingly immovable object standing in the way of Wilby’s plan is Lady Philippa Stratton, daughter of the late Earl of Stratton. Her brother now holds the title. Pippa is twenty two, wealthy in her own right, and her brother is no longer her guardian. She can do as she pleases when it comes to the Season and the Marriage Mart.

She does not please to marry Lucas Arden. Because once upon a time, just a few years previously when they were both a bit younger and a whole lot less cognizant of the effect a few careless words might have on the people around them, Pippa heard Lucas refer to her as ‘spoiled goods’. Not for any action of hers, but for her father’s indiscreet, utterly scandalous, behavior.

A scandal that touched Lucas every bit as closely as it did Pippa. But eavesdroppers seldom hear anything to their credit, and that was the case here. He owes her an explanation AND an abject apology. But it is water very much under the bridge at this point. That she let his words blight the next four years of her life isn’t ALL on him. Although she still doesn’t owe him the time of day.

But the Duke of Wilby is certain that Pippa and Lucas are perfect for each other. And he’ll move heaven, earth and everything in between in order to get them to see it too. Before his negotiations with his Maker come due.

Escape Rating C+: I had intended to read the third book in the Ravenswood series, Always Remember, this week but when I realized that I’d skipped this second book, Remember Me, I switched things up. I’ll get to Always Remember sometimes in February because it’s still the right month for a LOT of romance.

Howsomever, I ended up with a lot more mixed feelings about Remember Me than I expected after the first book in this series, Remember Love – which I liked rather a lot.

There were a couple of things that kept me from falling quite as hard for this second book in the series, one of which was the sheer proximity to yesterday’s book. Part of the reason I enjoyed A Body at the Séance so much was that I found Mabel Canning’s whole, entire life easy to identify with. She’s not rich, she’s not privileged, she’s a woman making it on her own and her life and times are just close enough that it’s easy to step into her shoes. Possibly except for the murder investigations she keeps falling into but still, she’s someone I’d love to have tea with.

Lady Philippa Ware is certainly a good character, as well as a decent human being, but in comparison with Mabel she’s too rich, too privileged, too beautiful and just too damn perfect to be anything other than a fairy tale princess character – including the title. I liked her, I could see why all the other characters warm to her, but she’s got it so easy in so many ways, in a time and place where so many people did not, that I didn’t love her nearly as much as I did Mabel – or as Lucas and his whole, entire family came to do.

I also need to confess that the conflict in this story, the engine moving the plot forward, the way that the Duke of Wilby in his role as benevolent tyrant pushed so hard to have his will be done, to make all the characters move on his chessboard without ever listening to a word they said about their own lives, is triggering for me in ways I can’t explain. And I fully recognize this is a ‘me’ thing and likely not a ‘you’ thing.

But still, I found myself utterly conflicted between the fact that ‘dammit he was right’ and just how much I wanted someone to push back against him and make it stick that it spoiled the story for me. There are so many ways his pushing and shoving could have and should have gone wrong that I wanted to scream at someone the whole way through.

Your reading mileage may definitely vary. In fact, I hope it does because I think a LOT of people are going to love this book. I’m just not one of them although I certainly expected to be.

Which leads me back around to the NEXT book in this series, the one I thought I’d be reading this week, Always Remember. I’m looking forward to that story because Lucas’ sister, Lady Jennifer Arden, has faced hardships and tragedies in spite of her wealth and status, and it looks like she’ll be finding a life-partner in spite of all the predictions that a woman with a fortune who can’t walk and can only get around in a push chair has no chance to marry anyone who will not be more invested in her fortune than herself. I have high hopes that Pippa’s older half brother Ben, the child of one of her father’s many, many scandals, will prove everyone wrong. Because Jenny deserves her own happy ever after and I’m looking forward to seeing her get it!

Review: Kinauvit?: What’s Your Name? by Norma Dunning

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews> C Reviews
Review: Kinauvit?: What’s Your Name? by Norma DunningKinauvit?: What's Your Name? The Eskimo Disc System and a Daughter's Search for her Grandmother by Norma Dunning
Narrator: Norma Dunning
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Canadian history, history, memoir
Pages: 184
Length: 6 hours and 4 minutes
on August 1, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Better World Books
Goodreads

From the winner of the 2021 Governor General's Award for literature, a revelatory look into an obscured piece of Canadian history: what was then called the Eskimo Identification Tag System
In 2001, Dr. Norma Dunning applied to the Nunavut Beneficiary program, requesting enrolment to legally solidify her existence as an Inuk woman. But in the process, she was faced with a question she could not answer, tied to a colonial institution retired decades ago: "What was your disc number?"
Still haunted by this question years later, Dunning took it upon herself to reach out to Inuit community members who experienced the Eskimo Identification Tag System first-hand, providing vital perspective and nuance to the scant records available on the subject. Written with incisive detail and passion, Dunning provides readers with a comprehensive look into a bureaucracy sustained by the Canadian government for over thirty years, neglected by history books but with lasting echoes revealed in Dunning's intimate interviews with affected community members. Not one government has taken responsibility or apologized for the E-number system to date -- a symbol of the blatant dehumanizing treatment of the smallest Indigenous population in Canada.
A necessary and timely offering, Kinauvit? provides a critical record and response to a significant piece of Canadian history, collecting years of research, interviews and personal stories from an important voice in Canadian literature.

My Review:

The title of this book is a question, because that’s how this author’s journey began. While it begins as a reclamation of identity, what that attempt leads to is a search for it – or at least, and with full irony as becomes apparent during the telling – a search for a very specific piece of government documentation that was intended, not to confirm but rather to deny the lived essence of an identity it was designed to repress if not, outright, erase.

That search for proof of her mother’s, and as a result her own, Inuit heritage led the author, not just to a multi-year search but also to a second act career in academia, exposing the origins and the abuses – whether committed out of governmental malice or idiocy – of a system that may have been claimed to be a system for identifying the Inuit population, but was truly intended to colonize them, divide them, and ultimately erase the beliefs and practices that made them who they were.

So on the one hand, this is a very personal story. The author had learned only in adulthood that she was, herself, Inuit. It’s a truth that her own mother refused to talk about as long as she lived. But when Dunning decided to apply for enrolment in the Nunavut Beneficiary program, she opened up the proverbial can of worms, discovering long-buried secrets that had overshadowed her mother’s life and the lives of all Inuit of her mother’s generation and the one before it. A history that was as poorly documented as her mother’s life and identity.

It’s a journey that began with a hope, middled with a question that turned into an obsession – even after that hope was answered – and led to the author’s search for a history that was long-denied but that needed to be brought into the light.

Reality Rating C: Kinauvit? is a combination of a personal search for identity with the intricacies of searching in records that were an afterthought for the government that recorded them, administered them and was, at least in theory, supposed to serve the people those records concerned but that the government obviously didn’t understand a whit. But the story of that personal search is mixed, but not terribly well blended, with a scholarly paper about the history of the Canadian government’s treatment and suppression of the Inuit peoples over whom the government believed it held sovereignty.

The two narratives, the author’s personal search and the scholarly paper that resulted from it (her Master’s thesis for the University of Alberta) both have important stories to tell, and either had the possibility of carrying this book. The issue is that the two purposes don’t blend together, but rather march along side-by-side uncomfortably and unharmoniously as they are entirely different in structure and tone to the point where they don’t reinforce each other’s message the way that they should – or was mostly likely intended that they should.

This book contains just the kind of hidden history that cries out to be revealed. But this attempt to wrap the personal journey around the academic paper results in a book that doesn’t quite work for either of its prospective audiences.

I listened to Kinauvit? in audio, which generally works well for me for first-person narratives, which this looked like it would be. Also, sometimes an excellent reader can carry a book over any rough patches in its text, especially for a work with a compelling story or an important topic that I have a strong desire to see revealed. Kinauvit? as an audiobook had both of the latter, a search that was compelling, combined with a deep dive into historical archives which is absolutely my jam, resulting in a true story of government neglect and outright stupidity.

But it is very, very rare that authors turn out to be good readers for their work unless they have some kind of performance experience. In all of the audiobooks I have ever listened to over the past three decades, I can only think of one exception to serve as an exception.

In this particular case, the author recites the book as though she was delivering the academic paper that forms the core of the book. But this publication of the work was not intended to BE an academic paper. The audience for this work would be better served with a narrator who is able to ‘voice’ the book, to use a narrative style imbued with the flow and the cadences of a storyteller.

The dry recitation that I listened to blunted the impact of the personal side of the story while the inclusion of the words “Footnote 1”, “Footnote 2”, etc., when one of the many, many footnotes occurred in the text was jarring to the point that it broke this reader out of the book completely. That the footnotes themselves consisted of the simple reference to the place in the source material from which the quote was drawn added nothing to the narrative but made its origin as a scholarly paper all too apparent.

In the end, this book left me torn. I wanted to love it. I was fascinated by its premise, and remain so. It’s important history and not just Canadian history. The truths that the author uncovered deserve a wider audience and more official recognition than has been achieved to date. But this vehicle for telling those truths doesn’t do them justice, even though justice is exactly what is needed.

Review: Cassandra in Reverse by Holly Smale

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews> C Reviews
Review: Cassandra in Reverse by Holly SmaleCassandra in Reverse by Holly Smale
Narrator: Kristin Atherton
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Chick Lit, time travel romance, women's fiction
Pages: 368
Length: 13 hours and 15 minutes
Published by Harlequin Audio, Harlequin MIRA on June 6, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads


If you had the power to change the past…where would you start?

Cassandra Penelope Dankworth is a creature of habit. She likes what she likes (museums, jumpsuits, her boyfriend, Will) and strongly dislikes what she doesn't (mess, change, her boss drinking out of her mug). Her life runs in a pleasing, predictable order…until now.• She's just been dumped.• She's just been fired.• Her local café has run out of banana muffins.
Then, something truly unexpected happens: Cassie discovers she can go back and change the past. One small rewind at a time, Cassie attempts to fix the life she accidentally obliterated, but soon she'll discover she's trying to fix all the wrong things.

My Review:

The problem with wanting to change things is that things change – including things we had no intention of changing. There’s that thing about the butterfly and its unintended wing flap to consider.

But when Cassandra Dankworth discovers, on her second repeat of the second worst day in her life, that she has the power to change her past, she quickly discovers that for every single thing she attempts to fix, there’s a journey down the road not originally taken that might be even worse than the one she originally took.

As difficult as that is for her to imagine. Because it really, truly was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day. Tinkering with it isn’t going to make things any better. Tinkering with the worst day of her life, the day her parents were both killed in a car accident ten years ago, seems to be out of her reach.

The one thing she can do, the event that the universe seems to be pointing her towards with increasingly sharp, poking fingers, is the day that she met her boyfriend, Will. The boyfriend who began her terrible, horrible, etc. day by breaking up with her.

She can’t save her parents, but she can save her relationship. If she can use her seemingly endless ability to tweak time to fix things. And herself. All she has to do is learn the lessons that the universe seems determined to teach her.

Even if they are not the lessons she wants them to be.

Escape Rating C: I ended up with a whole lot of mixed feelings about Cassandra in Reverse. I flipped back and forth between the audiobook and the text, trying to find a way to make myself comfortable in the story.

Which was probably a mistake on multiple levels, because the way the story begins makes it abundantly clear that Cassandra Dankworth is just not a comfortable person to be with. In audio the listener is bombarded with Cassandra’s rapidly firing mental processes – and it’s impossible not to understand why the people around her find her so “difficult”.

Howsomever, because we’re in her neurodivergent head and her first-person perspective, we are also able to empathize with Cassandra in a way that the people around her most definitely do not.

So we get both sides with both barrels – which does not make either of them a comfortable read.

Which means that it is not a surprise that when Cassandra discovers her limited power to time travel, the thing she truly wants to change – and by that I mean “fix” – is herself. Considering all of the completely negative and utterly damning messages that she has received over her life, and how much she has internalized those messages, she’s convinced that everything that happens to her is her fault because she’s broken. She ends up rewriting and resetting her encounters with pretty much everyone in her life, over and over, in order to learn proper behavior so she can fix herself and be happy like everyone around her.

The hard lesson in this story is that she’s not going to ever be happy like everyone around her because she isn’t like everyone around her. The lesson she needs to absorb is about accepting herself, finding other people who accept her as she is and not as society expects her to be, and make a life that works for her.

It’s a very hard lesson, and one that most of us struggle with for all of our lives. And at the end of Cassandra in Reverse I’m not even sure that Cassandra has figured out that that’s the lesson she was supposed to learn. Although it is possible to interpret the story that she did, and that her journey involves resetting everyone else’s as she passes by.

So I’m torn by this one. It didn’t work well for me, and found the audio to be a particularly rough ride because the drumbeat of how much Cassandra does not fit into the world around her is so very loud and harsh. I felt for her too much to want to experience the way the world treated her from so intimate a perspective.

Your reading mileage may vary.