Category: General Fiction

Quick Reviews No. 4

Leave a comment

The Confessions by Tiffany Reisz

This is a must read for all Original Sinners fans, particularly if you’ve completely all 8 books in the main series. It’s pretty much an ending to it all, although the first half takes place somewhere around the timeline of The Saint.

Part one is Soren’s confession to Father Ballard, immediately when he meets Eleanor the first time and realizes the temptation before him. Part two is Nora’s confession years later, when she finds a photograph in Soren’s Bible that brings up all kinds of conflicting feelings. And then there’s a fun interview with the author at the end.

Readers Advisory: I mean, obviously if you haven’t read the rest of the Original Sinners series you should start from there with The Siren.

The Bourbon Thief by Tiffany Reisz

I love a good crazy-pants plot, and this one was totally bananas. But in the best way. Combine VC Andrews with a bourbon distillery and this is what you get. It’s Southern Gothic, and has lots going on. CW for incest and attempted rape. But trust me, if you can handle those, this book is totally a ride you should take, because it wraps up completely wonderfully in the end.

Readers Advisory: Criminal podcast did an episode on Pappy Van Winkle recently and it is paired perfectly with this book.

Rookie Move by Sarina Bowen

I love hockey romance, and I knew I would love this series. I’d actually heard a lot about book two, and decided to start from the first one, just because I was that confident that I’d love it, and usually I find that reading in published order makes for a better reading experience. I did, in fact, very much enjoy this book!

The heroine is the publicist for the Brooklyn Bruisers, a fictional hockey team set in–you guessed it!–Brooklyn, NY. The hero is a new trade from a college team, and the heroine and hero have some unfinished business from the past. The romance was great and I loved it!

Readers Advisory: Rachel Gibson’s See Jane Score wasn’t a hockey romance that I loved, but the heroine is a reporter, so it’s kind of similar.

Hard Hitter by Sarina Bowen

The second Brooklyn Bruisers book was by far my favorite (although once no. 4 comes out I may change my mind!) Here we have an aging player who is having some physical issues and a yoga instructor/massage therapist who needs to help him, although he has experienced trauma and doesn’t like to be touched. It’s incredible, and also the heroine has a lot of baggage from an abusive relationship that she needs to overcome.

The romance was sizzling hot and I loved seeing the hero come out of his shell and embrace some vulnerability.

Readers Advisory: Hard Knocks by Ruby Lang also has a hockey player with physical challenges and a health care professional, although this one is a neurologist and he has concussions.

Pipe Dreams by Sarina Bowen

This as-of-yet latest book in the series was maybe my least favorite of the three, but that’s like having to rate your three favorite candy bars. Someone’s gotta be in last place, but that definitely doesn’t mean you would toss it!

This one is another second chance romance where the hero and heroine were once together but the hero ends up going back to his estranged wife after she is diagnosed with cancer. You’ve got a single dad and a heroine who decides she’s done waiting for love and going to have a baby on her own. Can the hero win her back or is it too late?

Readers Advisory: For another hockey player romancing a woman who is planning to have a baby without a man, check out Maybe This Love by Jennifer Snow. Isn’t it funny when you can find books that have such similar plot threads but are so different?

Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

This was our book club pick for August. It took a really long time for me to get into the story, but once it picked up, it was really good. I liked all the little threads and how it all came together, but it is quite long. I’ve only watched a little bit of the mini series from HBO and wasn’t hooked enough to continue. This book has all the content warnings though. Domestic abuse, murder, a teenager attempting to auction off her virginity on the internet, etc.

Readers Advisory: This is going to be a out-of-nowhere recommendation, but I just finished the podcast In The Dark, and if you like drawn out mysteries revolving a crime and larger societal issues that are at stake, you will definitely enjoy it. (CW: for child rape and murder.)

I just finished a batch of reviews from advanced copies, so check those out. I’ve been reading a lot more than I’ve been reviewing, so I still have lots of books lined up for quick reviews. I should have a few more full reviews before the end of the year, so keep an eye out!

Quick Reviews Edition #3

Leave a comment

By Her Touch by Adriana Anders

I very much enjoyed this book, and it may have been my favorite out of the three in the series. It begins with Clay Navarro, an undercover cop, being discovered by the motorcycle gang he’s infiltrated. After barely escaping with his life, he finds Dr. George Hadley, a dermatologist that specializes in tattoo removal, particularly in the tattoo was not consented to (as we saw in the first book, Under Her Skin). Clay doesn’t want to be involved with her as he is still in danger, but obviously, love wins. The climax of the book was edge-of-your-seat fantastic.

Readers Advisory: Obviously, I highly recommend all the other books in this series. Dr. George plays a significant role in the first book, and Sheriff Clay Navarro turns up in the third.

Play by Kylie Scott

The circumstances leading up to the hero and heroine getting together did stretch my suspension of disbelief a little, but otherwise, the story was interesting and fun. There was a little drama to keep the plot moving, and part of it seemed a little melodramatic. Is that common with New Adult? It was definitely a lighter read than what I typically enjoy, but the characters were vibrant and the chemistry was hot.

Readers Advisory: There’s a smidgen of fake-relationship for publicity in this one, so if that’s a trope you love, check out Act Like It by Lucy Parker. You won’t regret it.

The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

This was our book club book for August. It took me a really long time to get invested into it, mostly because the story uses an unreliable narrator plot device, and I’m starting to get burned out on those. There were also a lot of characters to keep straight. One thing that I did really like about this book was how it handled the main character’s anxiety, and her reliance on medication to treat it. Many of the other characters are dismissive of that, and it really helps shine a light on how that feels, and how people who are anxious are sometimes unfairly dismissed as crazy.

Reader’s Advisory: This book was eerily reminiscent of The Girl On The Train, but in different ways. I have a feeling that many people who liked one will like the other.

Perv by Dakota Gray

I love a good erotic romance, but there was something about this book that just seemed a little bit off to me. The character motivations and abrupt turn around for both on how they felt and reacted to things seemed a little strange. It was a huge girl-wants-revenge plot, that got kind of crumpled up and tossed aside quickly. And the hero just completely changed his entire outlook on relationships because of one girl that got under his skin. Playboys that meet their kryptonite, and all it takes is for the girl to play hard to get, don’t really work for me.

Readers Advisory: For a really amazing girl revenge book, I highly recommend Sugar Daddy by Sawyer Bennett. Holy moly that was a great trilogy. The hero also loves giving head, if that’s one of your catnips.

Crazy Pucking Love by Cindi Madsen

Now, a forbidden love story with two people who are in sync both romantically and as people, and the reason they can’t be together is an overbearing older brother? That I’m into. I enjoyed this story very much because there’s a lot of backstory for both characters (that I believe may be addressed in previous books, I’m definitely planning on checking them out) that completely made sense for the plot and why the two main characters were resistant to be together. Also, I’m a sucker for a hockey romance.

Readers Advisory: I just finished reading the first three books in Sarina Bowen’s Brooklyn Bruisers series, so if you like hockey romance, I highly recommend you check those out.

Misbehaving by Tiffany Reisz

This was a short novella that was funny and cute, about a woman who writes a column about sex toys and needs a partner for a weekend to ‘try out’ a book all about sex positions. Who better to help her out than the one that got away? There’s not a lot of substance to this one, but it was short and cute and I always love all the funny jokes and asides that Reisz injects into her writings.

Readers Advisory: Tiffany has many of her short stories available for free on her website, so you should definitely check those out.

More full length reviews to come! Keep an eye out for a new Tessa Bailey and a DNF (sad).

Quick Reviews Edition #2

Leave a comment

Another round of quick reviews since this summer has been crazy. I have slowed down a bit on the amount of reading that I’ve been doing and that makes me sad, but I am still enjoying a good book.

The Theory of Attraction by Delphine Dryden

I was pleasantly surprised by this book, and now only because it was set in Houston, near where I live. I found the chemistry between the two leads to be sexy and it was interesting to have a hero that wasn’t completely suave and sophisticated. In fact, Ivan is a bit of a mess in social circles. And it was a fun way to introduce the two characters together. Plus I love fake relationships.

Readers Advisory: For another book that includes a heroine newbie to the BDSM scene, I enjoyed Tara Sue Me’s Master Professor.

The Seduction Hypothesis by Delphine Dryden

This book is the second in the series that The Theory of Attraction is in, but it didn’t work as well for me. The hero is kind of an asshole, and it’s only through BDSM that he’s able to tame that part of himself? Reformed jerks are kind of a hard trope to play well. It’s usually better if he wasn’t a jerk at all, but there was a misunderstanding somewhere. But no, this guy is actually a jerk and kind of embodies some of the worst traits of toxic masculinity. There’s a fun subplot about conventions and cosplay though.

Readers Advisory: Another second chance romance that I enjoyed was Off The Clock by Roni Loren. Both have elements of BDSM, and also both have relative newbies to the scene.

Crimes Against A Book Club by Kathy Cooperman

This was our book club pick for July and it didn’t really interest me that much. The story got to be a little off its rocker and while the plot was somewhat interesting, it just didn’t grab me. I did find some of the overwhelmed stay-at-home-mom stuff to be quite relevant to me, but otherwise the book just didn’t have the power to suck me in. I’d consider it light, fluffy fiction.

Readers Advisory: If you just really like reading about book clubs and the lives of all the members, The Jane Austen Book Club was okay.

Crash Into You by Roni Loren

Now, I loved this book. It has everything I like: an interesting plot, sexy sexytimes, and two leads that are interesting yet flawed. It was a book that I found difficult to put down. The mystery was unexpected, and the conflict between the hero and heroine felt real and earned. Did I mention the sexytimes were sexy? Because they were.

Readers Advisory: I can’t currently think of any other books that have an undercover submissive and a second change romance coupled with a murder mystery, but if I think of one, I’ll update here.

Lick by Kylie Scott

Accidentally married in Vegas? A hot famous rock star and a barista? Sign me up! This has many of my favorite catnips. The only detractor for me was that the book is mostly New Adult, which means these are very young adults (early 20s) and some of the conflict that makes sense for youngin’s is a little old and stale for me. However, the relationship that blossoms between Ev and David is sweet and wonderful and a lot sexy. The rest of the bandmates were also well developed and I look forward to reading them all.

Readers Advisory: I have sadly not read many rock star romances, although I did enjoy the follow up to this one, Play.

Too Hot To Handle by Tessa Bailey

What I loved most about this book was that some normal stereotypes get flipped. In this book, it’s the man that is the “slut”. He’s realized that no one wants to have a relationship with him, all the women in his town see him as is a one-time good time, and a loser that named a bar after a dirty joke (it’s called the Liquor Hole…. say it out real slow). Jasper is trying to turn things around, and starting with Rita, a woman who just showed up out of the blue after her road trip van broke down, he wants to prove to himself that he can have a relationship that is more than just a one time thing. Rita has her own demons, and they fight them together.

Readers Advisory: This is another book that’s so unique I’m having a hard time finding something else to recommend along side it. I’ve been working my way through the other books in the series and so far I’ve enjoyed them!

Many of these books are available at your local library! Use Worldcat.org to find a copy near you.

Review: The F Word

Leave a comment
tl;dr: formerly overweight woman is plagued by high school broken heart

The Story:

Finishing this book was a struggle.

I’m not totally sure if it’s because the ‘women’s fiction but not romance’ genre, otherwise known as chick lit, is just not for me anymore, or if the book is actually not that good. I didn’t connect with any of it, and not because the gist of the story wasn’t interesting. It’s because the actual story fell very flat for me, mostly because I kept getting pulled out of it by visceral disgust or general disagreement with some of the things that were plied off as truth.

The F Word is apparently a follow-up to Conversations with a Fat Girl, which I didn’t read. That story is about Olivia’s friend, and while Olivia is a character in that book, the friend at the center of the first book is barely even mentioned in this one, which is what it is. This book takes place ten years after the first one. Olivia has been living in her Hollywood life with her doctor husband and working in a PR firm for celebrities. We are supposed to be making parallels between Caroline Lang, Olivia’s actress client going through a divorce, and Olivia herself. They both maintain an icy I’m-better-than-you demeanor, although it’s hard to tell from Caroline whether she means it or if it’s just a coping mechanism left over from her lonely childhood. Olivia, on the other hand, is just mean. She’s mean to her socialite couple friends, and makes very little effort to have friends of her own. She seems closer to her mom and her mom’s friends, although she doesn’t bare herself to anyone. Literally. She’s been married ten years and her husband has never seen her naked.

Continue reading →

Review: The Girl on the Train

Leave a comment

I the-girl-on-the-train-coverwent into this book not knowing a thing about it, and I think that played in its favor. I wasn’t expecting any of the twists and turns, and so I was just along for the ride.

This book is from the perspective of 3 women whose lives become intertwined. Rachel is the alcoholic woman scorned, who is still hanging on to the hope that she will be reunited with her ex-husband. Megan is the neighbor that Rachel watches on her daily commute on the train, imagining the rich life that she is leading and the husband that dotes on her. Anna is the other woman, trying to pursue her own happily ever after while being pulled between the narratives surrounding each of the first two.

Without giving much away, the story builds through the variety of viewpoints and time periods to build a really interesting mystery. I did find the ebook format to be not conducive to being able to follow the timeline though. In a print book, it would be easy to flip back and see where we left off time wise with each narrator, and even to the beginning of the story. After awhile, I tried to ignore the time stamps, but there are pretty important to the way that the story is constructed. I think this would be even worse on audio. Particularly confusing is when the story jumps from the present to the past and back to the present, and I was confused about how much time had passed between the two present day chapters. Each chapter is broken into days, and those days are broken into morning and evening, or sometimes morning and afternoon, or some combination. There was a lot of going back and forth that disrupts the flow of the reading experience, as I was trying to place where I was in the timeline.

This book uses the red herring device a lot. I can see how some readers would be put off by this, but I thought it added a lot of layers to the story and they weren’t too disruptive. It was good to see the viewpoints of the same events from three sides, also.

This is a layered, complicated story that I really enjoyed. This review is purposely vague because most of the enjoyment that I got from it was the experience of peeling away those layers and building upon the story in order to get to the final reveal. The ending itself was just okay. Sometimes I can imagine a better way for the story to end, but in this instance it may be the best that it could be. The way that I thought it was going to go would have been really melodramatic and cringe-worthy, and I’m glad it didn’t go that way.

5 stars.

This book fulfills no requirements for the challenge.

Review: The Nightingale

Leave a comment

NightingaleThis book is a long, sweeping historical drama about love, family, and war. It takes place in France during the Nazi occupation during World War II. The story goes back and forth between two estranged sisters, Isabelle and Vianne, who are dealing with feeling abandoned by their father and each other along with the increasing desolation and hopelessness of war.

Vianne watches her husband and all the men in her small village leave to fight for France. She continues to try and keep her daughter safe despite soldiers moving in and food and supplies becoming scarce. Isabelle can’t stand to watch by and do nothing, so she begins to work for underground networks and aid the resistance. The narrative jumps forward to the present day (well, 1995) life of one of the women a couple of times, although it isn’t clear which sister it is until the very end.

I wasn’t really aware of how much France had been affected by WWII and the Nazis, so this was a new angle on the war for me. I read The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult last year, which had a lot of the same historical events happening with it, although Picoult’s book has more of the Gestapo’s point of view than this book does (though still not a lot). This book deals mostly with the two sisters and how their relationship to each other changes throughout the war. There are some side plots, but family is the prominent theme in the book. Also the risks we take to protect those we love and also to believe in love at all. Isabelle falls in love with another member of the resistance, but he pretends he doesn’t feel the same in order to make it easier if one of them perishes, for example. A mother’s love for her children and the risks that she takes (or, doesn’t take) in order to ensure their safety is a recurring plot thread.

The book is depressing, and the behavior from the Nazi soldiers made me feel stabby. There’s a lot of sadness in this book, as people die, are killed, or are otherwise abused at the hands of the soldiers. It feels bleak at times. But throughout it all, there is a glimmer of hope in humanity. There are a lot of low lows in this book, but it ends on an uplifting and sweet tone. I highly recommend this book if you want to be swept up in a story about loss and love.

5 stars.

This book fulfills the book set in a place you’ve always wanted to visit requirement for the challenge.

Review: Penelope

1 Comment

13490638This book includes an absurdist play (Caligula) with a demented director, and it seems like perhaps the author was going for some sort of absurdist story to go with it. Penelope is a story about a freshman’s first year at Harvard University, except it doesn’t really follow most people’s idea of what that would entail. Honestly, her experience somewhat resembles mine. Not in the details, but in the broader sense.

Penelope is cautiously optimistic when she arrives at Harvard, but since she isn’t a legacy student, she really doesn’t know what is going on. It appears that most of the orientations and things are much more important than she is lead to believe by the information packages she receives. She quickly feels like she is missing out on forging new friendships. She is reluctantly embraced by some guys in her dorm, one of which is obviously attracted to her. She begins to navigate classes and dining hall experiences with unwanted advances from her TF (teaching fellow, like a grad assistant) and her neighbor. She has a chaste affair with a European gentleman. Her roommates are not into her at all.

Aside from several men trying to aggressively court her, I can understand her loneliness and anguish at not having had the college experience that I hoped for. The part that I can’t really relate to is how she reacts to it. She seems fairly oblivious until the end when she “realizes” that she is not making any inroads in these various relationships. She barely has any sort of character arc at all. The whole thing is somewhat depressing but none of the people that she meets are nice at all, and most of them are downright awful. The academic portion is pretty unrealistic too, as are the course titles, but I feel like that was an intentional choice meant to show that Harvard academics are pretentious and not really worth anything in the real world. It’s part of why I think that the absurdist play is supposed to be a reflection of the world of this book.

There really isn’t much more to say about the  book. Apparently there is a book group discussion guide and I’m really curious to look at it and see what there is even to discuss about this book. It was not what I was expecting based on the cover art – which goes to show that you really shouldn’t base a book on its cover.

3 stars.

This book fulfills the book based entirely on its cover requirement for the challenge.

Review: The Heart Goes Last

Leave a comment

Content warning: major spoilers near the end of the review!

Heart-Goes-Last_Atwood-2I usually really enjoy Margaret Atwood books, but this one left me feeling a little dissatisfied. The premise itself is very interesting. It’s a dystopian near future, where there’s been a horrible economic downturn and large cities are now ghost towns of vigilante youths and people living in their cars. The book follows Charmaine and Stan, a former middle class married couple that are running out of money and options. Charmaine works at a dirty diner/brothel and sees a commercial for an experimental community that offers jobs and security to everyone it accepts. So they sign up for Positron and Consilience – a duel community where residents live half the month in an actual prison and the other half in the adjacent community.

The plot begins to get sinister from there, where there are red hot affairs, spies, executions, and lifelike sex robots. And many Elvis impersonators, but yeah. It would take a long time to really detail all the plot because it is quite intricate. Atwood interweaves the perspectives of both Charmaine and Stan as different chapters throughout the book, and even if the audio book wasn’t narrated by both genders, I think it would be easy to follow along. They each have a unique voice and temperament, which comes across in their chapters. She also only gives the reader the same information that each character actually has, so as you are unfolding the story there is a layer of suspense as you don’t really know what’s happening.

So, yes, this book is masterfully crafted, as many of Atwood’s books are. But it just doesn’t deliver the same punch that many of the other books of hers that I’ve read have. A large part of that is the operation that Charmaine may or may not have undergone. When I believed she had, it felt icky. When it is revealed at the very end that she hadn’t, I just felt cold. I think particularly the reaction of Stan was unsettling. He is practically misogynist, and he is supposed to be the hero of this story. Well, not even practically – he is. He has several rape fantasies towards Charmaine and other women, and even when he believes that Charmaine is his willing (albeit lobotomized) sex slave, he is unhappy about it. He treats Charmaine like dirt, and is surprised that she had an affair and also “killed” him. For all of the book’s social commentary about the treatment of women, it doesn’t do a lot to propose an alternative.

I went back and forth on the rating for this book. It is definitely well-written, engaging, and thought-provoking. All good things that I look for in a novel. But that ending – and really, the final few chapters – brought it all down for me. It turns out that the book is divided into 5 parts, and each had been released over time through a service called Byliner. That service recently shut down, and so Atwood decided to release the book as a legitimate release, with the final 5th part included for the first time. It does make sense, then, why that ending feels really disjointed with the rest of the story. In the end, I decided not to weigh too heavily on the final chapters, but it definitely still colored how I feel in total.

3 stars

This book fulfills the book published this year requirement for the challenge.

Review: The Martian

Leave a comment

the-martian-coverThere are so many things about this book that make it unlikely that I would have read and enjoyed it, it seems strange that I would have happened upon a recommendation that intrigued me so much that I opted to actually read it. First, it’s about space. Space is not only a topic that I don’t seek out, but I actively avoid it. I frequently lament that we should forget about space and focus on the planet that we have. Second, it’s about being stuck in space, which is something that brings up feelings of anxiety in me. And third, it’s heavy in the science, which normally would make me fall asleep while reading. Despite all of these things that I normally don’t like and try to avoid, this was a really fantastic book.

Part of the appeal of this book is the humorous way that the protagonist shapes the beginning of the narrative. I think the lack of context in the beginning (it starts off with a series of log entries by Mark Watney, the astronaut stranded on Mars, and later fills in third person omniscient narrative) is actually a selling point to non-technical readers. The book doesn’t waste time filling in the blanks and gets straight to the problem of the book. We don’t even really get what went wrong with the mission that left Watney stranded until about midway through the book. It keeps the pace brisk, yet with enough hand-holding to keep the interest of a lay reader.

The book follows a formulaic narrative that could maybe get a little tiresome if it wasn’t for the humorous asides and everyman perspective we get from Watney. Something goes wrong, Watney panics. He comes up with a risky yet plausible plan. It mostly works, although a few things fail. He complains about 70s pop culture. Something else breaks, and we begin again. This general idea repeats about 4-5 times throughout the book, but somehow it isn’t as noticeable until you begin to describe the plot to someone else.

I have mixed feelings about the ending, but not because it wasn’t what I hoped for. Perhaps because it was incredibly predictable with no last minute twists, it didn’t have as much of an impact. It’s not a book that really sticks in your mind or that delivers a big punch. This isn’t a bad thing, per se, but it doesn’t have a WOW factor.

One thing that this book does incredibly well is have a diverse group of characters who have believable motivations and personalities. There was an overwhelming amount of white guys, but that is unfortunately pretty reflective of space exploration in general. Watney’s main contact at NASA is someone of Indian heritage named Venkat Kapoor, there are several Asians both on NASA’s team and in China (duh), where some of the story takes place. Apparently the character of Mindy Park is Korean, which I couldn’t tell from reading, but that’s also pretty cool. There’s also a German crewmember on the Ares 3 mission.

I’m planning to see the movie and maybe get some more context and visual help on some of the more sciencey things, and see how it compares to the picture in my head of the story. For a book like this, I felt like maybe what I was imagining was pretty far off the mark since I don’t have any love for space, and therefore, very little context over what elements of the story of purely fiction or what is science.

This book fulfills no requirements for the challenge.

Review: Beloved

1 Comment

th

This review was kind of a hard one to write, because my feelings on the book are a little mixed. There’s part of me that can recognize the genius in this book and see why it has become part of the American literature elite, why it appears on so many syllabi, and how it has received all the accolades that it has. But the other part of me just didn’t enjoy it at all. And not for the obvious reason – that the subject matter is about as enjoyable as a funeral – but because it just wasn’t a novel that really got to me the way I like a serious novel to get to me. It was so confusing and vague that I had a hard time knowing exactly what was happening, and that seriously impacted how I experienced it.

The book is a strange mixture of slavery narrative, a story about motherhood and risking everything to protect your children, and a ghost story about mistakes coming back to hurt you. The part about the slavery is less a history lesson and more of a backdrop, which is a common criticism of the book but not one that bothered me. What bothered me was that I couldn’t follow the through-line at all. I ended up having to read a summary in order to figure out exactly what happened, because it wasn’t clear at all. There were some parts that were repeated over and over so there was no mistaking what had happened, but I felt like those were ancillary to the story. The actual story of what happened to these people was vague and fuzzy. This was, perhaps, by design, because the book is just as much about memory as it is about anything else, and how trauma shapes those memories. It was, however, a fatal flaw for me, because without understanding the true horror of what happened, the act that Sethe takes to protect her children (namely, murder of one and attempted murder of the rest of her children when the slave owner finds her) seemed too rash and almost inexplicable. Almost as though the event was just tossed in for sport or sensationalism, when the entire book actually hangs on this one incident.

The infanticide is based on the true story of Margaret Garner, a slave who escaped and killed her two-year-old daughter rather than let her experience the horror of slavery. Toni Morrison based her entire story on this, and of a vision or idea she had of a ghost coming out of the water – the ghost of the child that had been killed, all grown up and back for … revenge? Reunion? It’s hard to say. This is not the part that turned me off. It’s admittedly the minutiae – what happened to Halle? Was Sethe raped? Why does it mean that they “took her milk”? Was Beloved real? Did she become pregnant? How exactly did the escape from Sweet Home go? Did I even read this book, or did I just imagine that I did? The mysticism and vagueness of some of the plot doesn’t bother me as much, but I have to say that I was so confused that I didn’t really grasp what I was reading.

I don’t like to waste time re-reading books, because there are so many books to read and one’s life is only so long. But I feel like in order to understand the basic plot of this book, several readings are in order. And if you have to really dig into a summary or re-readings in order to understand the general thread of what happened, I feel like that is a major failure.

I find it difficult to really pinpoint or make clear what I disliked about this book so much, because as I describe it, it seems powerful and amazing. But that just did not carry over in the actual reading of it. Important Novels (with an uppercase I) should have a power to sweep you away and give you something to turn over in your mind, but all the thoughts I had over this book were less of thinking about issues that it could have raised and more about what exactly did I just read?

3 stars

This book fulfills the based on a true story requirement for the challenge.