Eric

A mystery about a murder at a boarding school where the wrong man may be in prison. This one was a slow start, but really picked up in the last 150 pages or so. Rebecca Makkai wrote one of my fav books (The Great Believers), so I wanted so badly to love this. I did LIKE it, but I thought it was confused and perhaps 100 pages too long. It was trying to say too much, about the injustices in our penal system, about MeToo and grooming, about inequality, etc. it just felt a bit convoluted and could have done well with some editing.

This was such a fun book. A gay man takes his brother's kids for the summer after tragedy befalls them and they help each other heal in their own ways. It was well-written and each character had their own distinct voice, which I actually find is rare in books these days. Would love to see it as a series or movie - Andrew Rannells in the lead.

I really struggled with this rating, because part of me wants to give a 3.5 instead of a 4, but I really did enjoy it. I just think it was a little sloppy. It's about a writers' retreat (shocked) that goes awry. It took a while to get going, but once it did, it was spooky and dark and kind of twisted! But I found some parts to be so unrealistic that I couldn't overlook. And there's a book-within-a-book element that I thought was SO boring. I liked the ending and overall enjoyed.

This was only 225 pages and the chapters were all only 4 to 5 pages long, so it went quickly. The digestible nature of the chapters made the pace much quicker than most books and added to the overall urgency of the story. It was a flourish of activity, mostly related to the title ... but at its core, I thought it was about jealousy, the burden we place on the oldest child, and the societal/spillover effects of psychopathy if it is left unchallenged.

A woman who no longer wants to live finds herself in a purgatory of sorts, where she gets to try on every life she could have lived, trying to find the right one for her. This was a quick read, maybe took a week or so. It was fine enough, but I knew how it would end after the first like 20% of the book. Filled to the brim with platitudes and just sloppy writing. And because she kept hopping through lives, the characters never stuck around to be fully fleshed out. A neat premise but a missed opportunity.

I was looking for a similar quick queer romance after reading "Red, White, & Royal Blue" and I guess this sort of gave me that? But it was much more YA than anticipated, so the characters read extremely juvenile and underdeveloped. I almost canned it several times because of the inner monologues of the characters that just sound like 16-year-olds, because they ARE. But I pushed forward because it was so short. I think if I were twenty years younger, I'd like it, but it was just too immature for me, in the end.

I thoroughly enjoyed this read, though it did read more slowly than I would have liked. It's a detail-rich story with Russian history in footnotes thrown in and a LOT of Slavic names, so I had to constantly turn back to previous chapters to remember characters. BUT - it was a lovely chronicle of one man's house arrest in a luxury Moscow hotel, from the Revolution up through the Cold War. It seemed that the smaller his world got, the more it opened up, as he discovered more and more about himself, his friends - both old and new - and Russia as it changed.

This started as a Halloween read that took too long to get off the ground. The prose is at times unintelligible as it takes up to an entire page to describe a carousel and using metaphors that are quite odd on the regular. It didn't really get exciting until I was 60% of the way through the book, but it did hit a good clip until about 90% when it slowed down again. All in all, it was not worth the read and I'm not sure what the hype is about. Perhaps people found different things scary in the 40s? But the scariest part of this book was that one of the men had tattoos, which was mentioned approximately 400 times.