Review: The White Lady by Jacqueline Winspear

Review: The White Lady by Jacqueline WinspearThe White Lady by Jacqueline Winspear
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery, World War I, World War II
Pages: 352
Published by Harper on March 21, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBook DepositoryBookshop.org
Goodreads

The White Lady introduces yet another extraordinary heroine/sleuth from Jacqueline Winspear, creator of the best-selling Maisie Dobbs series. This heart-stopping adventure follows the coming of age and maturity of former wartime operative Elinor White—veteran of two wars, trained killer, protective of her anonymity—when she is drawn back into the world of violence she has been desperate to leave behind.
A reluctant ex-spy with demons of her own, Elinor finds herself facing down one of the most dangerous organized crime gangs in London, and exposing corruption from Scotland Yard to the highest levels of government.
Post-World War II Britain, 1947. Forty-one-year-old “Miss White," as Elinor is known, lives in a village in Kent, England, so quietly and privately as to seem an enigma to her fellow villagers. Well she might, as Elinor occupies a "grace and favor" property, a rare privilege offered to faithful servants of the Crown for services to the nation. But the residents of Shacklehurst have no way of knowing how dangerous Elinor's war work had been, or how deeply their mysterious neighbor continues to be haunted by her past.
It will take the child of Jim Mackie, a young farmworker and his wife, Rose, to break through Miss White's icy demeanor—but Jim has something in common with Elinor. He, too, is desperate to escape his past. When the powerful Mackie crime family demands a return of their prodigal son for an important job, Elinor assumes the task of protecting her neighbors, especially the bright-eyed Susie, who reminds her of the darkest day of her life.
Elinor’s wartime training and instincts serve her well, but as she endeavors to neutralize the threat to Jim, Rose and Susie Mackie, she is rapidly led along a tunnel of smoke and mirrors in which former wartime colleagues – who know the truth about what happened in 1944, and the terrible event that led to her wartime suicide attempt – are compromised by more powerful influences.
Ultimately, Elinor will hold a gun to the head of a Mackie crime lord to uncover the truth behind the family's pursuit of Jim, and in doing so, reveal the far-reaching tentacles of their power—along with the truth that will free Elinor from her past.

My Review:

For the past several years of her cases (since The Mapping of Love and Death) March has been the month of Maisie. Maisie Dobbs, that is.

Which means that all of Maisie’s fans and friends are pretty much primed for a book every March  filled with Maisie’s inimitable style of detection and the combination of found and birth family that she has gathered around herself to help her both solve her cases and live a life that combines danger and intrigue with a intense insight into the human nature that has created the situations in which she regularly finds herself.

Maisie seems to have taken a vacation this March, and in her place we have Elinor White, who both is and is not the ‘White Lady’ of the title.

Elinor’s story is told in two timeframes, both her present in 1947 and the past that led her there, from her childhood in occupied Belgium through her wartime service in the top-secret Special Operations Executive to the point where her past meets her present after the war.

We first meet 1947 Elinor, a middle-aged spinster living in a ‘grace and favor’ cottage in Kent. That cottage was granted to her for her lifetime for services rendered to the crown in both wars, and it’s what those services consisted of that makes up the past we have to see, and the lessons Elinor has to learn, before the person we met in 1947 comes fully into focus.

And then shatters when she learns that what she believed was the worst crime she ever committed was nothing that she did at all. The crime was committed by someone she believed was a friend and an ally. Although she is certainly the one who paid for it then, and very nearly does again.

It’s only after the smoke clears, quite literally, that Elinor White may be able to step forward into a future that holds more than waiting for fate to catch up to her and make her pay for all the wrongs she committed in the name of a greater purpose.

If she can set aside the necessary cautions that come from having survived not one but two wars as a spy and saboteur.

Escape Rating B: I ended this book with a LOT more mixed feelings than I expected going into it. I enjoy the Maisie Dobbs series because I find the history interesting, Maisie’s perspective fascinating, and the story as a whole absorbing. I like the characters and more importantly I CARE about them every bit as much as I care about seeing the solution of the mystery.

It’s the care that was missing in my reading of The White Lady. The history was every bit as fascinating as I was expecting from this author. While Britain’s Special Operations Executive and the women who served as agents in it have appeared in an increasing number of stories lately – as have the women of Bletchley Park – Elinor’s experiences as an agent of La Dame Blanche – the Belgian resistance in World War I funded by Britain – were new to me. Her experiences in the Belgian Occupation, when she was just barely into her teens, were searing and absorbing.

But something about those experiences feels like it set Elinor herself just a shade apart from real life – or at least from her own real life. She seems so used to keeping herself utterly guarded – a necessity during the war that kept her alive – that she remains just a touch removed from the life we read about in this story. It makes it difficult to know her well enough to care about her character.

I didn’t feel invested in her journey and it kept me from being absorbed in the story.

Which doesn’t mean that parts of it were not fascinating, because her surprising – to herself most of all – foray into a police investigation of the criminal gangs controlling vast swaths of London had the potential for chills and thrills – and delivered them as well as a bit of schadenfreude that the men who thought they knew everything – both among the police and among the criminals – discovered they were wrong, wrong, wrong. And still weren’t convinced they’d been hoodwinked by a gang of women. Or that a woman figured out the real crime being planned while all the experienced detectives dismissed her at every turn.

In the end, I liked The White Lady but didn’t love her. I’m glad I read this one but not disappointed that it appears to be a standalone title and not the start of a new series. I hope we see Maisie again next March – or whenever her next adventure appears.

Review: A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher

Review: A House with Good Bones by T. KingfisherA House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, Gothic, horror, paranormal
Pages: 256
Published by Tor Nightfire on March 28, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBook DepositoryBookshop.org
Goodreads

A haunting Southern Gothic from an award-winning master of suspense, A House With Good Bones explores the dark, twisted roots lurking just beneath the veneer of a perfect home and family.
"Mom seems off."
Her brother's words echo in Sam Montgomery's ear as she turns onto the quiet North Carolina street where their mother lives alone.
She brushes the thought away as she climbs the front steps. Sam's excited for this rare extended visit, and looking forward to nights with just the two of them, drinking boxed wine, watching murder mystery shows, and guessing who the killer is long before the characters figure it out.
But stepping inside, she quickly realizes home isn’t what it used to be. Gone is the warm, cluttered charm her mom is known for; now the walls are painted a sterile white. Her mom jumps at the smallest noises and looks over her shoulder even when she’s the only person in the room. And when Sam steps out back to clear her head, she finds a jar of teeth hidden beneath the magazine-worthy rose bushes, and vultures are circling the garden from above.
To find out what’s got her mom so frightened in her own home, Sam will go digging for the truth. But some secrets are better left buried.

My Review:

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, I am my mother after all,” or so goes the sampler. Sam Montgomery is experiencing something even weirder and creepier – she’s watching her mother turn into her frightening and downright abusive grandmother – and it’s scaring them both to death.

Sam is worried that her mother is going through early-onset Alzheimer’s. Or some really bizarre stage of delayed grief over her grandmother’s death. Or that she’s just fallen off her trolley. And there’s just a bit of worry on Sam’s part that whatever is going on with her mother is genetic – and that someday it will happen to her.

Although channeling her mother – as she was before this whole thing started – wouldn’t not be all that terrible. Her mother was cool. Her grandmother, on the other hand, was cold as the grave even before she was put into one herself.

But still, Sam is an academic, specifically an archaeoentomologist. Research is what she does. So she does. Research, that is, into what is happening to her mother, when it started, how it’s progressing, and whether or not there is anything at all that Sam can do about it.

What she finds are a whole lot of secrets that really, truly should have remained buried. And that the house her mother inherited from Sam’s grandmother doesn’t just have good bones – it also has very strong teeth.

Escape Rating A-: I never expected to find a story at the intersection of gothic horror with “I am my mother after all” and “academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small” – but here is A House with Good Bones and that’s exactly where it sits. With a vulture circling over it.

At first, the horror is the kind that happens all the time. Sam comes home for a long visit when the dig she’s supposed to be on gets postponed, only to find that her mother isn’t quite right. As we reach middle age and later, if our parents are still with us at that point, we all come to realize that they aren’t quite what they used to be as time and possibly illness or tragedy take hold. As we see their mortality and we begin to feel our own.

And that’s what Sam fears most. At first. It’s a very real fear but it isn’t usually the kind that leads straight into gothic horror and then down into the depths of something even creepier. But this time it does. And does it ever!

As Sam digs deeper into the family history, she learns that that history wasn’t nearly as above-reproach or nearly as respectable – as her late Gran Mae made it out to be. There are some real skeletons in the family closet, and more than a few of them are still haunting the house.

Then again, so is Gran Mae.

Sam will have to dig deep, under the house and into her own reserves in order to lay all of the family skeletons to rest. One way or another.

Two things made this story for me. Actually three. One is that I will read anything T. Kingfisher writes, even in genres I don’t read much of – like horror. Second is that the initial horror is so very mundane and real, making it easy to get sucked into the story. Third is the character of Sam Montgomery herself, as in this book she represents the snarky, sarcastic and self-deprecating voice of the author.

Which is where that element of “academic politics” comes into the story. Sam is able to triumph over Gran Mae not because she’s all-knowing or all-powerful or any of those standard heroic tropes. Sam wins the day because she knows herself, in all her faults and all her virtues. Gran Mae’s insidious voice has no place of entry into Sam’s mind or heart because she’s survived so much worse in the bloody (not literally), hallowed (not exactly) halls of academe.

So I read – and loved – A House with Good Bones not for its horror but for Sam’s snarkcasm and the wry smiles and chuckles and occasional guffaws that it engendered. And it was terrific.

Review: The Raven Thief by Gigi Pandian

Review: The Raven Thief by Gigi PandianThe Raven Thief (Secret Staircase Mystery, #2) by Gigi Pandian
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy mystery, mystery, thriller
Series: Secret Staircase Mystery #2
Pages: 320
Published by Minotaur Books on March 21, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBook DepositoryBookshop.org
Goodreads

Multiple award-winning author Gigi Pandian is one of the best locked room mystery writers working today. Her newest heroine, Tempest Raj, returns in The Raven Thief, where sliding bookcases, trick tables, and hidden reading nooks hide something much more sinister than the Secret Staircase Construction crew ever imagined.
One murder. Four impossibilities. A fake séance hides a very real crime.
Secret Staircase Construction just finished their first project with Tempest Raj officially a part of the team—a classic mystery novel-themed home interior. Their client is now ready to celebrate her new life without her cheating ex-husband, famous mystery author Corbin Colt. First up, a party, and Tempest and Grandpa Ash are invited to the exclusive mock séance to remove any trace of Corbin from the property—for good. It's all lighthearted fun until Corbin's dead body crashes the party.
The only possible suspects are the eight people around the séance table—a circle of clasped hands that wasn't broken. Suspicion quickly falls on Grandpa Ash, the only one with actual blood on him. To prove her beloved grandfather’s innocence, Tempest must figure out what really happened—and how—or Ash will be cooking his delectable Indian and Scottish creations nevermore.

My Review:

Hidden staircases are far from the only secrets that Tempest Raj has to contend with in this second book in the Secret Staircase Mystery series, after the events of last year’s locked room mystery/thriller romp, Under Lock and Skeleton Key.

In fact, the Raj family seems to be keeping an entire hidden vault chock-full of secrets, each believing they are protecting the others – and Tempest herself is no different. But those secrets – or at least a few of them, very nearly put Tempest’s beloved grandfather Ash into prison.

It all starts innocently enough. Lavinia Kingsley wants to exorcise the demon of her cheating ex-husband from her life in general and from the home they once shared in particular. As the bastard is very much still alive – and still living in town – Lavinia decides on a fake séance to remove his virtual or spiritual presence. A ceremony in which she plans to burn a box of papers he left behind when he moved out – into his new girlfriend’s house.

Even in a real séance, the practitioner does not expect the corpse of the dearly or not-so-dearly departed to manifest in the room. So it’s more than a bit of a surprise – it’s a downright shock – when Corbin Colt’s still warm body drops from the ceiling to the middle of the table.

Tempest’s magician friend Sanjay prepared the room for the fake séance, but that was absolutely not one of the props he planned to include!

But that preparation included all the participants surrendering their cell phones, all of the doors to the room being locked, and all of the lights dimmed to set the ‘right’ atmosphere for the event. When that body drops right in front of him, Ashok’s instincts as a retired doctor are to examine the victim in the hopes that he can save the man.

An instinct that unfortunately covers Ash in the evidence used to indict him for the murder of a man who once filed a restraining order against him for assault.

Leaving Tempest and her friends in the same position they found themselves in Under Lock and Skeleton Key – running an unofficial, unsanctioned and absolutely unprofessional investigation into a murder case involving her family that the police seem to have gotten all wrong. Again.

Escape Rating B-: Like the series opener, The Raven Thief is a cozy mystery thriller that takes the classic locked-room mystery and gives it a whole prop cupboard’s worth of new, inventive and occasionally downright magical twists and turns.

When Corbin Colt’s case turns into a murder investigation, it’s not merely a locked room mystery. There are not just one or two, but four impossibilities built into his killing, from how did his murderer get the body into the ceiling with the séance attendees in the room to how did he get so recently dead when he was seen a half hour away by hundreds of witnesses just a few minutes before his shocking demise?

Watching Tempest figure out just how it was done and whodunnit was a lot of fun, filled with oodles of surprises and misdirections, but it takes a fair amount of book to get there.

What was much less fun, or at least much more disjointed, was following Tempest as the family secrets and curses that have plagued her life twisted her up, sent her on more than one wild goose chase and just generally muddied the waters of both the case in hand AND the overarching story of her family and the tragedies that have followed them around the world.

Tempest’s family have a long and storied history as stage magicians – a history that included Tempest herself until just prior to the events of Under Lock and Skeleton Key. Both her mother and her aunt were murdered due to a secret not yet revealed. A mysterious figure that Tempest has nicknamed ‘Moriarty’ is stalking her, claiming to be protecting her but that is murky at best and the reader, along with Tempest is still very much in the dark about his true purpose.

So there are two stories combined into The Raven Thief, and they don’t manage to jell into one. The case of the dead bastard, while not exactly straightforward, had the potential to be a delightful mystery romp of an arsehole getting his just desserts that gets twisted by human emotions and clever misdirection.

The secrets that the Raj family are keeping from one another keep rising up to bite them in the collective arse – which could make the mystery more fascinating. But so far it feels like trying to solve an equation for too many unknowns and they just muddy the waters – at least for this reader.

I did enjoy the last third of the book, as the case in hand starts drawing towards its conclusion. I love Tempest’s quirky family and their even quirkier business adding whimsy, hidden rooms and secret staircases to houses. I’ve also read and liked a few of the books in the author’s Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt series. Taking all of those things together means that I’ll be picking up the next book in the Secret Staircase Mystery series in the hopes of getting a few more clues to all of those pesky family secrets that keep getting in Tempest’s way.

Review: The New Guys by Meredith Bagby

Review: The New Guys by Meredith BagbyThe New Guys: The Historic Class of Astronauts That Broke Barriers and Changed the Face of Space Travel by Meredith Bagby
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: history, nonfiction, science, science history, U.S. history
Pages: 528
Published by William Morrow & Company on February 7, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBook DepositoryBookshop.org
Goodreads

The never-before-told story of NASA's 1978 astronaut class, which included the first American women, the first African Americans, the first Asian American, and the first gay person to fly to space. With the exclusive participation of the astronauts who were there, this is the thrilling, behind-the-scenes saga of a new generation that transformed space exploration
The story of NASA's Astronaut Class 8, or "The F*cking New Guys," as their military predecessors nicknamed them, is an unprecedented look at these extraordinary explorers who broke barriers and blasted through glass ceilings. Egos clashed, ambitions flared, and romances bloomed as the New Guys competed with one another and navigated the cutthroat internal politics at NASA for a chance to rocket to the stars.
Marking a departure from the iconic military test pilots who had dominated the space program since its inception, the New Guys arrived at the dawn of a new era of space flight. Teardrop-shaped space capsules from Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo gave way to the space shuttle, a revolutionary space plane capable of launching like a rocket, hauling cargo like a truck, and landing back on Earth like an airliner. They mastered this new machine from its dangerous first test flights to its greatest achievements: launching hundreds of satellites, building the International Space Station, and deploying the Hubble Space Telescope.
The New Guys depicts these charismatic young astronauts and the exuberant social and scientific progress of the space shuttle program against the efforts of NASA officials who struggled to meet America's military demands and commercial aspirations. When NASA was pressured to fly more often and at greater risk, lives were lost in the program's two biggest disasters: Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2003).
Caught in the crosshairs of this battle are the shuttle astronauts who gave their lives in those catastrophes, and who gave their lives' work pursuing a more equitable future in space for all humankind. Through it all they became friends, rivals, lovers, and ultimately, family.

My Review:

Just as Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff set its portrait of the original astronaut class, the Mercury Seven, into its time and place in the history of the space program and the 1950s space race that preceded it, The New Guys performs a similar service for the 1978 astronaut class, the 35 astronauts recruited to help design, build and crew the Space Shuttle.

The concepts behind the books may be similar, but the people they follow were very, very different, both by design and because of the events of the intervening decade, the tumultuous 1960s, when the civil rights movements took hold and gained more ground than anyone could have imagined in the 1950s.

At the same time, there’s something similar in the two groups, that both were willing to sit “on top of an enormous Roman candle…and wait for someone to light the fuse,” as Wolfe said about the group of astronauts he portrayed. That most of the fuel for that Roman candle sat next to rather than directly under the Space Shuttle at launch doesn’t change the unstated point in that quote, that sometimes that Roman candle might just explode instead of providing liftoff – and that every astronaut who sat atop or beside it knew it.

Because it had happened before – and might happen again.

But before the disasters that marked the waning days of the Space Shuttle program, Challenger and Columbia, first there were the years of endless testing, of heady excitement, of competition to be the first as well as the camaraderie of being part of the most glorious dream that humanity ever imagined. The journey to leave this “big blue marble” in order to see its beauty and its fragility from the black of space.

The astronaut class of 1978, “The New Guys”, “Thirty-Five New Guys (AKA TFNG)” or “Those F*cking New Guys” as they were dubbed by the old hands, were recruited for the express purpose of making the “final frontier” seem like a possible dream for everyone, and not just restricted to a few white men who could qualify to be military test pilots.

This is their story. The story of a dream given form. But also the story of the personal costs to those who dreamed that dream – and to their friends and families. And underlying the good and the great, the firsts and the glory of it, there’s a hidden uncurrent of an organization and a country who cared more about the costs and the potential financial benefits than they did about the lives of the people sitting on or by that Roman candle.

Escape Rating A+: I loved this. Truly, seriously, I just loved it. And even though the eARC version I read did not include the pictures, I could still picture more of it in my head than seems possible.

But I do need to confess that I have a soft spot in my heart for the space program and books about it and I always have. So I expected to love it and was NOT disappointed. Howsomever, if you plan to read the book after reading this squee of a review, do get a copy with the pictures. Also, be advised that this is a much quicker read that it would seem from the stated length. The notes are EXTENSIVE.

All of that being said, what made the book work for me was that it was a view from the inside of something that I always wanted to be inside of but would never have had the chance. At the same time, because of the time period the story covers, it sheds light on some darker parts of the history I lived through from the 1970s and into the 2000s.

And there certainly were dark places, even before the shadows left behind by the Challenger and Columbia disasters – the causes for which are not glossed over here. Instead, the deep dive into the reasons behind both made me cry – because neither needed to happen and yet were inevitable because of situations that could have been predicted and corrected long before either explosion.

But a big part of what made this book so absorbing were the stories of how many of the individuals in this particular class of astronauts came to the point where they applied for the program, and how their perspectives were affected by the situations they came to the program from. Six of the new astronauts were women, one of whom was Jewish. Three of the men were African American, one was Asian American. In other words, 10 out of those 35 new astronauts were people who would never have been permitted into the selection process before this class, and faced bigotry and resentment as well as intense scrutiny along with all of the personal and professional stress that came with becoming astronauts.

Their stories felt real in a way that previous astronaut stories may not, because there were finally people that more of us could identify with.

But this book also contains those huge hard places, as it pokes and prods its way into NASA’s overall culture, the frequently terrible economics of the times when the Shuttle Program was at its peak, and how those factors played into the Challenger and Columbia disasters. Those sections are frustrating, infuriating and heartbreaking at the same time. It’s a rough read but so very necessary to set the whole story in its proper context.

The story of The New Guys takes the TFNG from their earliest dreams of space to the ends of their careers. But there’s a wider context to the story of the space program as a whole, placing this book in the center between the machismo of Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and the end of the era as told in Leaving Orbit by Margaret Lazarus Dean.

In conclusion, if you ever dreamed of becoming an astronaut, if you ever wondered what it would be like to go through the intensity – and occasionally insanity – of that program, The New Guys will give you a taste of what it was like for someone you might have been inspired by – or aspired to be. If you are looking for a dive into the causes of the Challenger and Columbia disasters that is accessible to both the layperson and the layperson’s tear ducts, this book will make the whole mess human, comprehendible and utterly frustrating and infuriating at the same time.

The New Guys is a book to touch both the heart and the stars.

Review: The Lies of the Ajungo by Moses Ose Utomi

Review: The Lies of the Ajungo by Moses Ose UtomiThe Lies of the Ajungo (Forever Desert, #1) by Moses Ose Utomi
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy
Series: Forever Desert #1
Pages: 96
Published by Tordotcom on March 21, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBook DepositoryBookshop.org
Goodreads

Moses Ose Utomi's debut novella, The Lies of the Ajungo, follows one boy’s epic quest to bring water back to his city and save his mother’s life. Prepare to enter the Forever Desert.
A Library Journal Best Book of the Month!
They say there is no water in the City of Lies. They say there are no heroes in the City of Lies. They say there are no friends beyond the City of Lies. But would you believe what they say in the City of Lies? In the City of Lies, they cut out your tongue when you turn thirteen, to appease the terrifying Ajungo Empire and make sure it continues sending water. Tutu will be thirteen in three days, but his parched mother won’t last that long. So Tutu goes to his oba and makes a deal: she provides water for his mother, and in exchange he will travel out into the desert and bring back water for the city. Thus begins Tutu’s quest for the salvation of his mother, his city, and himself.
The Lies of the Ajungo opens the curtains on a tremendous world, and begins the epic fable of the Forever Desert. With every word, Moses Ose Utomi weaves magic.

My Review:

The Lies of the Ajungo is a story that reads like a myth, and is also a story about mythmaking, sitting comfortably at the intersection of fable and fantasy and making the reader uncomfortable in its stark descriptions of how easily people can be led to believe a lie – and the lengths that the powerful will go to maintain it.

If those people are desperate enough and if their oppressors are both ruthless and clever. Very, very clever.

Tutu grew up under the incessant drumbeat of the oppressive, repressive, depressive mantras about his city. A city that has come to be known as ‘The City of Lies’. But Tutu is too desperate to let those endlessly repeated phrases keep him from his quest to be a hero for his city and find water to save his city and his mother. Mostly, to save his mother.

What he finds on his trek through the Forever Desert is that everything that has been said about his city is a lie, and that the name is the biggest lie of all.

He finds friends and companions. They help train him to become a hero – and he helps to train them as well. And they all believe in each other – because they are all from ‘The City of Lies’ and nothing about any of their cities is what they thought. Or were taught. Or believed.

They find the truth, a truth that has the possibility of setting their cities free of the lies told by their conquerors.

If only the rest of their people can set aside all the lies they have been told and tear down each city’s Palace of Lies.

Escape Rating A+: I loved this when I read it last year for a Library Journal review, and I loved it just as much when I reread it last week. It’s an awesome and thoughtful story and I don’t think I can do it justice, but I’m going to try.

The story begins as a tragic but rather typical epic fantasy-type quest. When Tutu sets out he’s the young hero, the chosen one, setting out to save his people. We’ve seen this story before, and if it had continued in that vein it would have been beautifully written but not necessarily special beyond that.

And that’s where it takes its turn into that something special, as Tutu gets a big chunk of his naivete blasted away, learns that his quest has a cost, and discovers that he and his city are not alone. That a heinous crime is being committed, and committed in such a way as to inflict maximum cruelty at minimum cost to as many people as possible.

Which is when the story shifts from epic quest for water to even more epic quest for justice. The truth sets Tutu and his companions free, even as it grieves them for everything that all of their peoples have lost over the centuries, and just how terribly they have all been betrayed.

What made this even more fascinating is that there’s no magic involved in any of it. There’s no Sauron or Palpatine. No monster and no supervillain. It’s just people behaving very, very badly and other people being at first terribly gullible and eventually just terribly downtrodden.

While Tutu learns, to his cost, that both sides are invested in maintaining that narrative, whether because they want to keep the power they have illicitly gained or because they can bear to have their illusions destroyed of simply because they’ve just drunk way too much of the ‘kool-aid’ and can’t let go of their beliefs.

It’s possible to read The Lies of the Ajungo as merely the epic quest it first appeared to be. But the more one thinks about it, the more the sand of that desert blows into the cracks of that initial interpretation. It’s a story that stuck with me the first time I read it, and it’s still sticking this time as well.

I always love a good story that also makes me think, and The Lies of the Ajungo is most definitely that. I highly recommend this quickly read fantasy that will leave you with a long book hangover of was and would be and might have been and might yet be kinds of thoughts.

The Forever Desert is a place that is more than capable of holding multiple legends, but when I read The Lies of the Ajungo last year it seemed as if those stories would remain untold. I’m very happy to say that is no longer the case, and a second story from the Forever Desert, The Truth of the Aleke, will be published this time next year. A story which sounds every bit as beautiful, harrowing and yes, legendary, as this first one.

Review: The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older

Review: The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka OlderThe Mimicking of Known Successes (Mossa & Pleiti, #1) by Malka Older
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: climate fiction, mystery, science fiction, space opera, steampunk
Series: Mossa & Pleiti #1
Pages: 176
Published by Tordotcom on March 7, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBook DepositoryBookshop.org
Goodreads

The Mimicking of Known Successes presents a cozy Holmesian murder mystery and sapphic romance, set on Jupiter, by Malka Older, author of the critically-acclaimed Centenal Cycle.
On a remote, gas-wreathed outpost of a human colony on Jupiter, a man goes missing. The enigmatic Investigator Mossa follows his trail to Valdegeld, home to the colony’s erudite university—and Mossa’s former girlfriend, a scholar of Earth’s pre-collapse ecosystems.
Pleiti has dedicated her research and her career to aiding the larger effort towards a possible return to Earth. When Mossa unexpectedly arrives and requests Pleiti’s assistance in her latest investigation, the two of them embark on a twisting path in which the future of life on Earth is at stake—and, perhaps, their futures, together.

My Review:

The Mimicking of Known Successes throws steampunk, mystery, climate fiction and planetary colonization into a blender with a soupcon of dark academia, a scintilla of romance and just a pinch of Sherlock Holmes pastiche to create a delightful story that leans hard on its central mystery and the push-pull relationship of its puzzle-solving protagonists.

It’s also a wonderful antidote to the recent spate of darkly corrupt academia. Or at least provides a much needed light at the end of some recent deeply dark tunnels in that genre. (I’m looking at Babel and both The Atlas Six and yesterday’s book, The Atlas Paradox.)

That light is in the characters, Investigator Mossa and her once and likely future lover, Scholar Pleiti. Neither of whom can resist a mystery. Or, as before and now again, each other.

The mystery begins, not with a dead body as such stories usually do, but with a missing one. It’s assumed that Scholar Bolien Trewl jumped, or was pushed off the platform at the last station on the end of the line around the gas giant moon these refugees from Earth have settled upon.

There is literally nothing else to do at that station except wait for the next train back inward, visit the four buildings on the platform, or drop off into the gas-wreathed planet below. The missing scholar isn’t still around, he didn’t board the next inbound train, so that leaves suicide or murder by plummet.

But that conclusion doesn’t make sense to Inspector Mossa. The pieces don’t add up. But those same pieces definitely lead her into temptation. The missing man was a Scholar at Valdegeld University, as is Mossa’s former flame Pleiti. Who might be of assistance in this investigation. Or the coincidence may just be an excuse to find out if the flame still burns.

As it turns out, more than a bit of both. And the game is most definitely afoot.

Escape Rating A+: This was a re-read for me. I reviewed The Mimicking of Known Successes last year for Library Journal, but I loved it so much that I kept referring to it in other reviews that I couldn’t resist giving a much longer review here.

So here we are.

At first, it was the setting that grabbed me. Mossa’s trip to that very remote station gives the reader a terrific introduction into the way this world both works and doesn’t, along with a taste of the marvelously steampunk-y nature of the whole thing.

Trains, the trains are so delightfully retro, while the planetary location is anything but. It’s not exactly a surprise that in this future view of the solar system, Earth is a painful and pined for reminder that humanity totally screwed the pooch of their home planet. Humanity is in exile, and seems caught between those who have settled down to make the most of their new home and those who are working towards a return.

That the divide reflects the town vs. gown contention that marks many college towns is just an added fillip to the whole. It’s the University that is devoted to a return, even as they spawn committees and arguments and delays and endless studies focused on the optimal way to go about it.

A process that the victim seems to have been at the heart of. As is Pleiti.

While the setting is fascinating and new, the details of academia that resemble the reader’s present provide a grounding (so to speak) a point of reference and congruence, and a whole lot of dry wit, particularly from Pleiti’s insider perspective.

As the story is told from Pleiti’s first-person perspective, we’re inside her head as she observes just how much her own profession obfuscates the important things and sweats the small stuff all the damn time.

Which lets the reader understand why Pleiti has let herself be drawn into Mossa’s investigation. It’s not just the rekindling of an old flame, it’s the need to work on something that has concrete and immediate effects that can’t be reduced to a footnote.

Even though Mossa and Pleiti nearly are reduced, not so much to a footnote as to a smear of grease on a cracked launchpad as the conspiracy and the mystery reach their explosive conclusion.

I initially picked this one up for its SF mystery blend, a combination that is having a marvelous moment right now. (If you want more of this combo, I highly recommend Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty, The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal and Drunk on All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson along with John Scalzi’s Lock In.)

What grabbed me and kept me sucked in, TWICE, was the introduction to this quirky colony and its Sherlock and Watson investigative duo as they pursued the mystery to its surprising end. What kept me smiling and even chuckling all along the way were Pleiti’s wry observations of the familiar world of academe wrapped inside an utterly fascinating but not nearly so familiar setting.

When I first read The Mimicking of Known Successes last fall, it seemed to be a standalone book and I was a bit sad about that because I loved the characters and their world and the way they work together in it. So I was really pleased to discover that Mossa and Pleiti will return in February, 2024 in The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles. I’m looking forward to finding out what that title will mean for their relationship and their necessary investigations.

Review: A Tempest at Sea by Sherry Thomas

Review: A Tempest at Sea by Sherry ThomasA Tempest at Sea (Lady Sherlock #7) by Sherry Thomas
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Lady Sherlock #7
Pages: 336
Published by Berkley on March 14, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBook DepositoryBookshop.org
Goodreads

Charlotte Holmes’s brilliant mind and deductive skills are pulled into a dangerous investigation at sea in the new mystery in the bestselling Lady Sherlock series.
After feigning her own death in Cornwall to escape from Moriarty’s perilous attention, Charlotte Holmes goes into hiding. But then she receives a tempting offer: Find a dossier the crown is desperately seeking to recover, and she might be able to go back to a normal life.
Her search leads her aboard the RMS Provence, sailing from Southampton for the eastern hemisphere. But on the night Charlotte makes her move to retrieve the dossier, in the midst of a terrifying storm in the Bay of Biscay, a brutal murder also takes place on the ship.
Instead of solving the crime, as she is accustomed to doing, Charlotte must take care not to be embroiled in this investigation, lest it become known to those who harbor ill intentions that Sherlock Holmes is abroad and still very much alive.

My Review:

Murders at sea are even more claustrophobic and self-contained than the traditional English cozy house murder. When a murder occurs on shipboard, the suspect pool and the detectives, whether any of the above are professionals or mere amateurs of convenience, are all stuck with each other and bereft of outside help, information or escape until the ship reaches port.

(If the idea of a shipboard mystery sounds like fun, try A Restless Truth by Freya Marske. It’s also a fun shipboard historical mystery, but with more than a touch of spells and magic.)

There’s no possibility of scapegoating a mysterious outsider on a ship, once it’s out of range of land, as the RMS Provence certainly is by the time that Jacob Arkwright’s body is found. Charlotte Holmes, AKA Sherlock Holmes, can be certain that his murderer is among the small number of passengers and crew already aboard.

It should be an easy case for her to solve. And it would be, if Charlotte, even if she has to masquerade as Sherlock yet again, was traveling as herself. Or as even as himself.

They’re not, and that’s where all the sticky wickets come in and stick themselves quite firmly to Charlotte’s person, traveling incognito as the redoubtable – and quite real if otherwise occupied – Mrs. Ramsay.

It’s a mask that Charlotte can’t afford to drop – and not just because suddenly revealing her subterfuge will make her the primary suspect in the murder. Even though she and her friends and colleagues aboard ship fear her unmasking at every turn.

Because the detective who just so happens to be aboard the Provence is none other than the intelligent and implacable Inspector Brighton, a Scotland Yard CID investigator that Holmes got the better of – read as exposed that the Inspector’s implacability had sent him barking up the wrong suspect tree – in Murder on Cold Street.

Murder investigations uncover all kinds of secrets that their keepers would prefer to remain secret, whether they have anything at all to do with the case at hand or not. Charlotte’s travel arrangements do not, but the Inspector would very much enjoy exposing her all the same.

An exposure that would have potentially deadly consequences for Charlotte and all she holds dear. So she is forced to work through others to lead the investigation to a truth that will expose the murderer while keeping Charlotte and her purpose for being aboard hidden in the shadows.

It’s not an easy job, but it’s all in a day’s – or at least a voyage’s – work for Sherlock Holmes. With just a little more help than usual from her friends.

Escape Rating B+: After the events of the previous book in the series, Miss Moriarty, I Presume? Charlotte is presumed dead after facing Moriarty in her own personal version of the original Holmes story, The Final Problem. Hence Charlotte’s need to travel incognito.

Charlotte may be hiding from Moriarty aboard the Provence, but she is also in search of a solution to her dilemma. While Moriarty is hunting her, she is hunting him. Or at least, she is hunting his agents and their documents, at the behest of this world’s version of Mycroft. Who is not, in this case, her brother, but rather the brother of her friend and lover, Lord Ingram Ashburton.

Charlotte has made a deal with Lord Remington, AKA Mycroft. If she finds a particular stolen document, he’ll grant her official protection by his office, a protection that is potentially deadly to Moriarty if breached.

That Remington seems to have hampered her investigation at every turn – or at least that his agents have – is probably fodder for the next book. (I sincerely hope!)

Aboard the Provence, the game is very much afoot in a way that Charlotte can’t afford to play as herself for fear of exposure to Moriarty’s agents aboard the ship. Leaving Lord Ingram to serve as her eyes and ears while Charlotte and Mrs. Watson do a bit of surreptitious investigation in the persons of a couple of old biddies and Charlotte’s mother nearly lies her way into a murder charge.

It’s not all fun and games, but it is quite a bit of a lark for the reader as misdirection and mistaken identities abound at every turn. Charlotte is in her element while her friends battle their own nerves on her behalf.

As much as I enjoyed the mystery in this tempest, the way the story was told didn’t quite work as well as it might have – at least for this reader. The mystery is investigated and revealed in two tracks.

The first track is the investigation as it proceeds from day to day as the ship steams from Portsmouth to Gibraltar, with Lord Ingram serving as Inspector Brighton’s amanuensis as he interviews the potential suspects and goes further and further astray.

And then we go back in time a bit and observe Charlotte’s and Ingram’s real discovery of the murder, and their attempts to both cover up that initial discovery, hide Charlotte’s true identity, set up a series of subterfuges AND do a much more thorough and successful investigation of the crime while hiding more or less in plain sight.

The slips between those two tracks weren’t always obvious to me as the reader, although that may be a result of reading the electronic Advance Reading Copy and this will not be an issue for readers holding the final version of the book in their hands or devices.

That niggle aside, the mystery was still fascinating. I loved watching Charlotte work while hiding behind the kind of character masking that the original Holmes did so well – instead of hiding behind Sherlock Holmes himself.

I’m very glad that Charlotte Holmes’ adventures are clearly not over at the conclusion of this case, because this reinterpretation of the Holmes’ canon just gets better and better as the characters become more firmly developed and we get more firmly invested in them.

As Charlotte managed to complete her assignment, in spite of the interference of conducting an undercover murder investigation during her undercover operation, I’m looking forward to what happens next in her continuing story, whenever it may appear.

Review: Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace

Review: Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-StaceFirebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dystopian, science fiction
Pages: 416
Published by Gallery / Saga Press on May 4, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazon
Goodreads

Like everyone else she knows, Mallory is an orphan of the corporate war. As a child, she lost her parents, her home, and her entire building in an airstrike. As an adult, she lives in a cramped hotel room with eight other people, all of them working multiple jobs to try to afford water and make ends meet. And the job she’s best at is streaming a popular VR war game. The best part of the game isn’t killing enemy combatants, though—it’s catching in-game glimpses of SpecOps operatives, celebrity supersoldiers grown and owned by Stellaxis, the corporation that runs the America she lives in.
Until a chance encounter with a SpecOps operative in the game leads Mal to a horrifying discovery: the real-life operatives weren’t created by Stellaxis. They were kids, just like her, who lost everything in the war, and were stolen and augmented and tortured into becoming supersoldiers. The world worships them, but the world believes a lie.
The company controls every part of their lives, and defying them puts everything at risk—her water ration, her livelihood, her connectivity, her friends, her life—but she can’t just sit on the knowledge. She has to do something—even if doing something will bring the wrath of the most powerful company in the world down upon her.

My Review:

Firebreak isn’t about the game. Not that there isn’t one, and not that Mallory and her best friend Jessa aren’t playing it, but the story in Firebreak is not really about the game. Especially not to the degree that Ready Player One is about the game and the puzzle about the ownership of the game every bit as much as it is concerned with the near-future dystopia in which the story is set.

But they do have something in common – in both stories the game is the opiate of the masses that keeps people from thinking too hard or too long about all the many, many ways in which they and their worlds are totally and epically screwed.

Mallory and Jessa, and every single person they know in Old Town, outside the walls and checkpoints of New Liberty City – where all the elites live – is a survivor of the corporate wars between Stellaxis Innovations and Greenleaf Industries.

The war may have mostly devolved into an uneasy peace interrupted by intermittent skirmishes, but when the war was going hot and heavy mechs and artillery were everywhere, everyone lost family, friends, loved ones, homes and livelihoods. Most of their friends are the ONLY surviving members of their families.

Stellaxis controls water, and Greenleaf controls food. Living in a Stellaxis controlled area, with 9 people crammed in one room of what used to be an old hotel, they queue up every day for their meager water ration and work three, four or even six jobs to pay for rent, food and everything else.

An everything else which includes the in-game credits and items needed to stream their participation in the game BestLife. Which is, ironically, a simulation of the corporate wars.

Mal and Jessa’s gaming stream gets them just enough credits and in-game items to keep them going – albeit barely and on a shoestring. So Jessa jumps at the chance of a high paying sponsor – no matter how skeevy and weird the arrangement seems to be.

Mal is a whole lot more skeptical – but then Mal is just plain skeptical of people in general.

That would-be sponsor turns out to be, not even a small-time corporation, but instead a locked-out conspiracy theorist who might just have the parts of a key that leads to the largest and most dangerous Pandora’s Box of all time. A box that holds the biggest and dirtiest secrets that Stellaxis Innovations has buried in the deepest, darkest subterranean levels of their vast corporate complex.

Literally.

The truth might set Mal and Jessa and everyone they know, free of the corporate oversight that controls their every waking moment. Or it might get them all killed. Slowly by dehydration and kidney failure. Or as quickly as a bullet in the head.

Escape Rating A+: It’s not about the game. It’s about the world that the game lets everyone escape from while packaging and selling the war – and every control and draconian measure that goes along with it – to everyone at the same time.

Firebreak is the story of someone who has spent her life keeping her head down and putting one foot in front of the other, always on the brink of exhaustion, dehydration and starvation – just like everyone else she knows.

At 20ish, Mal is just barely old enough to remember a time before, that life didn’t used to be like this. She’s part of the last cohort to know that there used to be a better way – but she’s too tired and downtrodden to do anything about it.

So the story here is about Mal waking up and trying to do the right thing, or at least a potentially right thing, before it’s too late.

Once she sees the evidence that at the center of the war that Stellaxis has merchandised and sold to everyone is an unforgivable crime, she realizes two things. That someone has to do something. And that that someone is going to be her. Because she can’t unsee what she’s seen and she can’t unknow what she knows and she can’t let it go.

Because she might have been one of the orphaned children who got sucked in, brainwashed, genetically engineered and spit out to be the supersoldiers that sell the merchandise that funds the war. For as long as they live.

The story in Firebreak is about a scrappy, scared, struggling attempt by one “little” person to make a world-spanning corporation take just a tiny bit of responsibility for the evil that they’ve done. An evil that they bring fully to bear on anyone who lifts even a corner of their penthouse suite rug to see just how much dirt got swept underneath it.

Mal is naive, skeptical, and very definitely punching way above her weight class. A fact that is brought home to her with extreme brutality, over and over and over. But she can’t stop trying to do the right thing – even when so much of that attempt goes totally wrong.

In the end, we’re not sure she’s succeeded. And we’re really not sure it’s going to last. But her journey, every heartbreaking, pulse-pounding, sweat-dripping moment of it, keeps the reader on the edge of their seat until the very last page, hoping that there’s just a tiny bit more.

Firebreak is not nearly as much like Ready Player One as the blurbs might lead one to believe, because it’s not about the game at all – meaning that you don’t need to be a gamer or any memory at all of any era’s pop culture iconography.

The way that Firebreak DOES link to Ready Player One is in the way their dystopian settings do – or mostly don’t – work for most of the people who live in them. The world of Firebreak reads like what would have happened to Wade Watts’ world in RPO if Wade had lost the game and the evil corporation had taken over the OASIS. Possibly blended with just a bit of the dystopian setting of Veronica Roth’s Poster Girl with its conspiracy theories, mega-corporation spin doctoring and propaganda, and particularly the shared secrets at the hearts of their power structures.

Firebreak is an absolutely compelling read – with more than a touch of ominously prescient chill – from beginning to end. When I finished it I really wanted just a bit more – and that more is almost here.

A Firebreak prequel novella, Flight & Anchor, is coming in June. I know I’m going to get my heart broken all over again, but this is one of those times when I’m absolutely there for it.

Review: The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill

Review: The Crane Husband by Kelly BarnhillThe Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: fantasy, horror, magical realism, retellings
Pages: 128
Published by Tordotcom on February 28, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBook DepositoryBookshop.org
Goodreads

Award-winning author Kelly Barnhill brings her singular talents to The Crane Husband, a raw, powerful story of love, sacrifice, and family.
“Mothers fly away like migrating birds. This is why farmers have daughters.
A fifteen-year-old teenager is the backbone of her small Midwestern family, budgeting the household finances and raising her younger brother while her mom, a talented artist, weaves beautiful tapestries. For six years, it’s been just the three of them—her mom has brought home guests at times, but none have ever stayed.
Yet when her mom brings home a six-foot tall crane with a menacing air, the girl is powerless to prevent her mom letting the intruder into her heart, and her children’s lives. Utterly enchanted and numb to his sharp edges, her mom abandons the world around her to weave the masterpiece the crane demands.
In this stunning contemporary retelling of “The Crane Wife” by the Newbery Medal-winning author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon, one fiercely pragmatic teen forced to grow up faster than was fair will do whatever it takes to protect her family—and change the story.

My Review:

There is a group of tales in Japanese folklore about a crane who returns a favor to a man. The best known of those tales is The Crane Wife. This story isn’t exactly that one for any number of reasons, quite possibly the least of which is that in this case it’s the husband who is the crane. The question of whether this crane husband is or is not returning anything remotely like a favor to the woman who makes herself his wife is open to one hell of a lot of questions.

Questions that her teenage daughter is left behind to answer – after her mother flies away.

The story in The Crane Husband perches almost gracefully at the sharp, pointy end of the pyramid between magical realism, fantasy and horror. Alternatively, it’s just plain horror about a teenager coping with too many adult issues by processing them through mythmaking.

Or both.

On the surface, it’s the story told by a nameless teenage girl as she watches her mother become enraptured by a crane who turns into a man in the dark of night. Her mother, an artist who has always seemed to be barely in touch with the real world, gives her every waking attention and her every thought and care to her crane husband. She turns so deeply inward as well as orients so totally on the shapeshifting crane that she stops doing any of the tasks necessary to keep their tiny household barely afloat.

Her daughter does her best, just as she has been doing since her father died, to manage the sales of her mother’s stockpiled art – of which there is little – as well as managing the food and the finances in general just to keep the lights on and to keep both herself and her little brother fed and clothed and sent to school.

Even as she watches her mother self-destruct. Until the girl finally comes to the pragmatic and necessary conclusion that her mother can’t be helped and that she herself is probably too damaged to save but that her adorable, winsome, six-year-old brother still has a chance.

If she acts before it is too late for them all. Unless it already is.

Escape Rating B+: The story on the surface may or may not be the real story, and that’s the part that keeps the reader guessing – or at least kept this reader guessing – even after the last page was turned.

It could be myth coming to life, meaning that the surface story is the true story. That her mother gave herself over to the crane in the hopes of finding a magical escape from the farm and the children that she should have taken long ago. And can’t resist now that she has found another way.

Very much on my other hand, this is also a story about a teenage girl keeping her family together in the face of her only remaining parent’s criminal neglect. While she is stuck watching her mother’s abuse at the hands of a charismatic and dangerous man who will certainly turn to her once he tears and beats her mother into an early grave.

That the girl turns to the language of myth to tell the story to herself as a coping mechanism would be as reasonable a solution as anything can be in the situation she’s enduring. Especially as the version we’re reading is the version she’s telling herself twenty years after her mother left. Or died.

Or turned into a crane and flew away.

Whether her story is an exercise in rationalization, a tale of outright horror or something in the middle haunts the reader as the tale draws to its conclusion. Along with the now adult girl’s still plaintive search for the brother she failed to save after all.

Review: The Sister Effect by Susan Mallery

Review: The Sister Effect by Susan MalleryThe Sister Effect by Susan Mallery
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, relationship fiction, women's fiction
Pages: 416
Published by Hqn on March 7, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBook DepositoryBookshop.org
Goodreads

Beloved bestselling author Susan Mallery brings readers an emotional, witty, and heartfelt story that explores the nuances of a broken family’s complex emotions as they strive to become whole in this uplifting story of human frailty and resilience.
Finley McGowan is determined that the niece she’s raising will always feel loved and wanted. Unlike how she felt after her mom left to pursue a dream of stardom, and when the grandfather who was left to raise them abandoned her and her sister, Sloane, when they needed him most. Finley reacted to her chaotic childhood by walking the straight and narrow—nose down, work hard, follow the rules.
Sloane went the other way.
Now Sloane is back, as beautiful and as damaged as ever…and she wants a relationship with her daughter. She says she’s changed, but Finley’s heart has been burned once too often for her to trust easily. But is her reluctance to forgive really about Sloane or worry over losing what she loves the most? With the help of a man who knows all too well how messy families can be, Finley will learn there’s joy in surrendering and peace in letting go.
 

My Review:

Supposedly, “love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things and [it] never fails. But love is a feeling. It’s not the emotion that does anything. It’s PEOPLE who love and do all the other things in this famous list from the Bible.

In dysfunctional families such as the ones in this story, it’s the strongest members of the family who do most of that bearing and enduring – even after their hope is gone. The story in The Sister Effect (technically it should have been The Sibling Effect but that’s not nearly as catchy a title) is told from the perspective of that person in two initially separate families, that one who stands tallest and is supposed to forgive everyone else all their many and very real trespasses – even as they deal with the trauma that bearing inflicts. On top of dealing with the original trauma and the dysfunction and broken trust that followed it.

Jericho Ford is still grieving the sudden loss of his father as well as having to assume the helm of the family construction company a couple of decades before he thought he was ready. He thought his family had finally found their way to the other side of that grief when their dysfunction manifested in a way that honestly deserves its own episode of the Jerry Springer Show.

Jericho’s wife Lauren and his brother Gil didn’t just have an affair, they managed to fall in love and get pregnant. Jericho is supposed to forgive, forget, give his blessing AND be his brother’s best man. Jericho’s lack of grief over the end of his marriage is so easy to get past that he realizes that it had been over for a long time.

The way that his brother betrayed his trust is a LOT harder to get over. And he’s having a LOT of trouble over it. That betrayal cut deep, and he’s still righteously angry about the whole thing. His mother wants peace in what remains of her family, while Jericho wants to stop having to be the bigger man about damn near everything.

But Jericho’s righteous anger provides the lighter moments in this one. The bigger trauma, the larger betrayals, and the huge tragedy in the story belongs to Finley McGowan as she is forced to keep her own trauma and broken trust at bay every single day.

Because Finley’s sister Sloane is an alcoholic whose last great binge before entering rehab derailed all of Finley’s plans for a future that she was working damn hard for. At least until Sloane stole Finley’s pickup truck filled with $100,000 of supplies for the house she was flipping, sold off those supplies and wrecked the truck. Along with Finley’s credit rating, her job and her relationship with her fiance. (He turned out to be no great loss, but still…)

And left Finley, always the responsible one, to take guardianship of Sloane’s then 5-year-old daughter Aubrey while Sloane tried to accept both her alcoholism and the steps she’d need to take to deal with it for the rest of her life. An acceptance she’s having difficulty reaching no matter how hard or how faithfully she performs the steps to achieve it.

Like Jericho’s mother, Finley and Sloane’s mother expects Finley to accept the apologies and keep on believing that Sloane will turn her life around no matter how damn tired Finley is of having to pick up the pieces of the wreck Sloane makes of Finley’s life – over and over and over.

Both Finley and Jericho begin the story in a place of being resentful as hell. They’re both right. It’s not fair to them. They’re the ones who have to set their own emotions aside, over and over again, for the benefit of people they’re not really sure ARE sorry for what they’ve done. And they’re both really tired of their respective messes – which are SO not their fault.

But holding on to their anger and resentment isn’t doing either of them any good. It’s only when they reach out to each other that they find much, much better feelings to hold onto.

Escape Rating A-: So often, stories like this one focus on the journey of the person who has committed the wrong or is on the road to recovery from their issues. Stories that focus on redemption and healing. What I really liked about The Sister Effect was that instead of focusing on Sloane’s redemption arc or Gil’s transgression turned epic romance (not that both aren’t important parts of this story), the story instead focused on the people picking up the pieces of their destruction, Finley and Jericho.

Their anger, resentment and distrust felt oh-so-righteous. It’s a perspective that’s sometimes missing in redemption stories, that the people wronged are entitled to their feelings and that “sorry” doesn’t wipe it all away. Their trust has been abused and broken, and they have to process that loss before they can move on with their lives.

They both need to forgive, if not forget, for their own healing, but it’s a hard journey and the difficulty of it made the characters shine – even while they ranted and vented and cried.

While Finley’s story was so much more traumatic and heartbreaking, Jericho’s was a necessary part of the whole. The farcical nature of his family’s difficulty both managed to balance out the heavier nature of hers while giving them common ground for reaching their own happy ever after with their respective – and combined – dysfunctional families.

The Sister Effect turned out to be a wonderful story about the ties that bind – and sometimes strangle – within families that have been to hell and back together and separately and still manage to find a way forward – more or less together. That their journey resolves into just the right mix of hopeful ‘happy for now’ for Sloane’s on her journey while giving Finley and Jericho as well as Gil and Lauren the happy ever after they’ve finally earned.