Tag: alcoholism

Review: Speakeasy

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I gorged myself on Sarina Bowen’s True North series. I started with Bittersweet and gobbled them up like I was afraid I would starve without them. I shouldn’t have been surprised, I loved her Brooklyn Bruisers series, but for some reason, a small-town series set in rural Vermont wasn’t grabbing me. It wasn’t until Audible sponsored a group listen on Bittersweet that I figured I’d go ahead and start, and then I was hooked. (Never mind that I never figured out how to join in the group discussion, I inhaled those books.)

Speakeasy is the 5th book in the series. We get even more acquainted with May, who is Griffin Shipley’s (hero of book 1) little sister, Jude’s (hero of book 2) ride to Narcotics Anonymous, but we also learn more about Alec, who is Zara’s older brother (heroine of book 4). May and Alec both have reputations in their family of being the screw-up. That bumbling person that keeps messing up. (And while I feel like that title is quasi-deserved by Alec, May is rocking it and it’s mostly her low-self-esteem talking.) We learn in book 3 that May is an alcoholic, and that she’s been in love with her female best friend forever, but unfortunately for May, Lark is straight and also in love with a man. Book 4 shows us that May is moving on; she is in a committed relationship with another woman and seems to mostly have her feelings and her addiction under control.  Continue reading →

Review: The One You Can’t Forget

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Stories about school shootings are sadly never not relevant. In fact, the premise behind the tragedy that is the backdrop for the second installment in this series by Roni Loren is scarily prescient. I began reading this book the day of the Santa Fe shooting in Texas, trying to grapple with my own feelings about being so close to this latest preventable tragedy. The motive behind the fictional and the real murders appear to be unimaginably similar.

This book is barely about the shooting, however, and that’s how it should be. Tragedy shapes lives, but it doesn’t define them. Rebecca has to deal with a lot of the guilt that she has carried throughout the years, not only of being one of the few survivors, but also of her role in being the supposed inciting incident of one of the gunmen. There’s a lot to unpack here, which Loren doesn’t really spend much time on, but would make excellent discussion for a book group. Rebecca’s big secret shapes most of her life. She focuses on her career, trying to be the perfect daughter and career woman, taking pride in her efficient mask of productivity. The only problem is that she’s completely removed passion from her life in an effort to atone for past mistakes.

Wes Garrett has his own demons that he’s running from, but they are slightly less dramatic. After a series of poor choices, he’s now broke, teaching cooking classes at an alternative school for troubled youth. He was on the cusp of opening a fancy restaurant, having his photo in all the high end trade magazines, when a divorce completely knocked him off his feet, leading him to drown his sorrows in alcohol abuse. The catch is that the lawyer that represented his ex-wife is none other than Rebecca.

The romance between them goes in fits and starts, with both of them immediately recognizing their attraction to each other but trying to ignore it, while they are continually shoved into situations together out of coincidence. There’s great tension between them, from the agreement to be “friends who kiss” to the eventual “casual hook up” that turns into anything but.

Throughout the book, Wes has to deal with his tendency to run and hide in a bottle, and Rebecca has to come to terms with her PTSD and guilt over the shooting that occurred over a decade before. It all comes to a head with both of them having to set their fears aside in order to help a troubled kid.

If you are looking for tragedy porn here, look away. This book is not going to get into all of the whys and hows of school shootings, or any mass gun violence. This book focuses on the people who survive. And that’s where our attention should be.

free copy courtesy of NetGalley for review

Review: The Girl on the Train

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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.